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Preface

This document contains information about editorial practice for the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT)®, one of the vocabularies produced by the Getty Vocabulary Program. The other vocabularies are the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN)®, Union List of Artist Names (ULAN)®, Cultural Objects Name Authority (CONA)®, and Getty Iconography Authority (IA)™. The guidelines in this document are subject to frequent modification and addition.

The editorial guidelines are intended for use by contributors and editors of the Getty Vocabularies. Developers and other implementers of the vocabulary data may consult these gudelines to extrapolate information and guidance for implementation of the Getty Vocabularies.

Guidelines compiled and edited by Patricia Harpring, managing editor, and the Getty Vocabulary Program: Antonio Beecroft, editor, Robin Johnson, editor, and Jonathan Ward, editor, Emily Benoff, Digital Content Manager.

Purpose of the Getty Vocabularies

The AAT, TGN, ULAN, CONA, and IA are structured vocabularies that can be used to improve access to information about art, architecture, and other material culture. The Getty Vocabularies are not simple ‘value vocabularies’; they are unique knowledge bases in themselves. Through rich metadata and links, the Getty Vocabularies provide powerful conduits for knowledge creation, complex research, and discovery for digital art history and related disciplines.

  • Cataloging: The Getty Vocabularies are utilized as data value standards at the point of documentation or cataloging, to promote consistency in assignment of a term or to provide options among multiple terms referencing the same concept. The Vocabularies provide preferred names/terms and synonyms for people, places, and things. They also provide structure and classification schemes that can aid in documentation.

  • Linking: The Getty Vocabularies are used in linking, in order to reference the unique identifier of the Vocabulary record, or to otherwise reconcile their data.

  • Retrieval: The Getty Vocabularies aid in retrieval and discovery, utilizing synonymous terms, broader/narrower contexts, and other rich contextual data in search assistants, in database retrieval systems, and more broadly in a linked environment. The Vocabularies are rich knowledge bases that contain dozens of fields of rich contextual data about each concept, and semantic networks that highlight links and paths between concepts.

  • Research tools: The Getty Vocabularies are used as look-up resources, valuable because of the rich information and contextual knowledge that they contain.

Access

In order to meet the needs of these various user communities, the Getty Vocabularies are made available in several ways.

  • Data formats: As of this writing in 2024, releases include Linked Open Data (LOD) (JSON, RDF, N3/Turtle, N-Triples for GVP and Linked.Art), XML, Relational Tables, Web Services APIs. These files are used by developers or incorporated in various tools by vendors or others. We plan to release a MARC format version, as is now used for ULAN and TGN in the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF). Some of these releases contain simplified versions of the data, while others contain the full, rich data sets, providing versions to meet the requirements of various developer communities. The AAT, TGN, and ULAN are available as LOD, relational tables, and XML. AAT, TGN, ULAN, CONA, and IA are available through APIs. The data file releases are refreshed periodically throughout the year. The Getty Vocabularies are published under the Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-By) 1.0.

    Note that Getty is launching an exciting multi-year project to update the technical infrastructure of the Getty Vocabularies. As part of this work, we are retiring some service offerings, starting with the Relational Tables and XML downloads, and the XML Web Services at the end of 2025. A roadmap and transition plan to support the community during this change will be available in early 2025. If you use any of these services, please contact Mark Pyzyk at MPyzyk@getty.edu by January 2025 to share your use case, which will inform our transition planning.

  • Online search: The five Getty Vocabularies’ online search pages are consistently the top sites visited at the Getty Research Institute Web site each month. Using these search tools, catalogers copy-and-paste Vocabulary terms and IDs as part of their daily workflow. Researchers use the search to locate rich information about the Vocabulary concepts. In the results displays, for each concept the data fields are presented in a logical full-record display for end users, as well as in hierarchical views. The online search data is refreshed monthly.

    Various releases or utilizations of the Getty Vocabulary data may contain more or less of the full, available data for each Vocabulary record, depending upon the purpose of the release. An implementation that intends to ask complex queries using the Vocabulary data would require the full available data. In another example, if a developer only needs to link to the unique identifier for the concept, perhaps a streamlined data set would be more appropriate; e.g., the ULAN data (and soon TGN data also) that is included in the VIAF (Virtual International Authority File) is a subset of the full data available, which is streamlined and parsed to fit the particular requirements of MARC.

AAT Focus

Catherine wheel or rose window? AAT is a structured vocabulary, including terms, descriptions, and other metadata for generic concepts related to art, architecture, conservation, archaeology, and other cultural heritage. Included are work types, styles, materials, techniques, and others.

For further discussion of the history and scope of the AAT, see About the AAT.

Use

The Getty Vocabularies are copyrighted: Copyright © J. Paul Getty Trust and released under Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-By) 1.0 For details, see Obtain the Getty Vocabularies.

AAT Contributors

AAT is a compiled resource; it is not comprehensive. It grows over time to become gradually more comprehensive, to reflect changes in the development and usage of language and terminology, to accommodate new research in art history and archaeology, and to become ever more multilingual, multicultural, with terminology to allow indexing representing diversity and inclusive topics.

The AAT grows through contributions. Information in the AAT was compiled by the Getty Vocabulary Program (and earlier groups in Williamstown, Massachusetts) in collaboration with many institutions. Institutions interested in becoming contributors to the AAT should write to vocab@getty.edu, explaining the scope of their collections and likely contributions. For translation projects, see 4.4.2 Contributing Large Translations.

Contact

For further information, please contact the Getty Vocabulary Program at vocab@getty.edu.

Getty Vocabulary Program
1200 Getty Center Drive, Suite 1100
Los Angeles, CA 90049

Revised 15 November 2024