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Preface

This document contains information about editorial practice for the Cultural Ojbects Name Authority (CONA)®, one of the Vocabularies produced by the Getty Vocabulary Program. The other Vocabularies are Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT)®, Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN)®, Union List of Artist Names (ULAN)®, and Getty Iconography Authority (IA)™.

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 These Guidelines

This document contains rules and guidelines intended for use by contributors and the editors of the Getty Vocabulary Program. Implementers of the Vocabulary data should consult these guidelines to extrapolate information and guidance.

Purpose of CONA

CONA, AAT, TGN, ULAN, and IA Getty Vocabularies are structured resources for the visual arts domain, including art, architecture, decorative arts, other cultural works, archival materials, visual surrogates, and art conservation. Compliant with international standards for structured and controlled vocabularies, they provide authoritative information for catalogers, researchers, and data providers. Getty Vocabularies contain coreferences to other resources where topics overlap. However, they are unique in their global coverage of the defined domain, in citing published sources and contributors, in allowing interconnections among historical and current information, in accommodating the sometimes debated and ambiguous nature of art historical information, and in allowing complex relationships within and between Vocabularies.

The Getty Vocabularies are not simple ‘value vocabularies’; they are also rich ‘knowledge bases’ in themselves. Although each Vocabulary requires a small set of minimum data, the data model allows for rich data that may be exploited for research and discovery. Getty Vocabularies strive to be ever more multilingual, multicultural, and inclusive, focusing also on diversity, equity, unbiased and antiracist terminology, and accessibility. The Vocabularies grow through contributions from institutions and projects comprising the expert user community. They are freely and openly available for use under the Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-By) 1.0.provide.

  • 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.

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 (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. These releases may be transformed to comply with other formats, such as the MARC format 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 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.

CONA Focus

Yumedono or Dream Hall? CONA includes built works and movable works. CONA development focuses on architecture, multiples, and works depicted in other works. It is a thesaurus that includes titles, artist attribution, creation dates, relationships, and location for works both current and historical, documented as items or in groups, whether works are extant, destroyed, or planned but never built.

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

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.

Contributors

CONA is a compiled resource; it is not comprehensive and is not intended to be comprehensive. CONA grows over time to accommodate new research and discovery in its stated focal areas of architecture, art history, archaeology, and related disciplines. Information in CONA is compiled by the Getty Vocabulary Program in collaboration with many institutions and other expert users. Institutions interested in becoming contributors should follow instructions at Contribute to the Getty Vocabularies.

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 16 December 2024