About

The Getty Vocabularies are a collection of five tools—Art & Architecture Thesaurus® (AAT), Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names® (TGN), Union List of Artist Names® (ULAN), Cultural Objects Name Authority® (CONA), and Getty Iconography Authority™(IA)—that contain structured vocabularies for the visual arts domain, including art, architecture, decorative arts, other cultural works, archival materials, visual surrogates, and art conservation.

The mission of the Getty Vocabulary Program is to build the shared language of art history: structured vocabularies that connect people, collections, and ideas across cultures and time. Our vocabularies are open, interoperable, and built on international standards so they work within the tools and systems researchers and institutions already use. They are multilingual and multicultural by design, reflecting the diversity of global art history rather than a single tradition or perspective.

We do not work alone. We grow these vocabularies with the international community—through partnership, training, and outreach—so the language of art remains a living, evolving collective resource.

The Getty Vocabularies are managed by the Getty Vocabulary Program.

Over the years, Getty has improved the Vocabularies by leading in content development and technology, while ensuring that they remain accessible and useful to users across the visual arts and cultural heritage spheres. Since 2013, Getty has published the AAT, TGN, and ULAN as Linked Open Data (LOD), which provides an infrastructure to unlock access to many kinds of information in a wide variety of databases at museums, archives, and libraries around the world.

The Getty Vocabularies facilitate research by offering open, equitable access. The program behind these tools aims to make the Vocabularies ever more inclusive, with a focus on diversity, equity, unbiased and antiracist terminology, and accessibility.

The Vocabularies are available under the terms of the Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-By) 1.0.

In the 1980s, researchers at Getty recognized the need for a standardized language so that art history could enter the digital world. However, the ambiguities and differences of opinion that characterize art history would require that standards and vocabularies adapted for art would have to be flexible enough to operate across various disciplines, languages, and points of view.

This early work was informed by the Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art (CIHA), which developed the Thesaurus Artis Universalis (TAU). The Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) first took shape in 1980 and moved to Los Angeles in 1983. Under Getty leadership, museums, libraries, special collections, and scholars worked together to reach consensus on the best models for art vocabularies for the purposes of cataloging, research, and discovery. The Union List of Artist Names (ULAN) and Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN) were born in 1987. The Cultural Objects Name Authority (CONA) and Getty Iconography Authority (IA) followed in 2011.

The Getty Vocabularies harnessed the power of the thesaurus, leveraging its hierarchical and associative relationships, synonym management, unique identifiers, and data linking and interoperability. The Getty Vocabularies offered not only one "preferred" term for a concept, but incorporated the flexibility of multilingual support and contextual knowledge that would both enable scholarly research and accommodate diverse points of views.

Over the years, the Getty Vocabularies have changed with the requirements of their core community in order to remain relevant and drive innovation. Supported by a small editorial staff and technical team at Getty, as well as consultants, the Vocabularies continue to grow through partnerships with over 375 institutions, consortia, scholarly projects, and subject experts globally.