Data & Services

Getty Vocabularies

Ways to Access Data

You can access the Getty Vocabularies data in several ways, depending on your goals.

Getty Website

Users may search for individual terms and names in the Getty Vocabularies online. Data is refreshed monthly.

Online Tools: OpenRefine and SPARQL

Art & Architecture Thesaurus® (AAT), Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names® (TGN), and Union List of Artist Names® (ULAN) are available through OpenRefine and via a SPARQL endpoint.

OpenRefine is an open-source tool for data cleanup and transformation that allows data managers, developers, and others to reconcile data sets to the Getty Vocabularies. Data reconciliation refers to a verification process comparing target data against original source data.

A SPARQL endpoint is a web-based service URL that allows users to query Resource Description Framework (RDF) data using the SPARQL language.

Linked Open Data (LOD) Formats

The individual records of AAT, TGN, and ULAN are available in JSON, RDF, N3/Turtle, and N-Triples, with full downloads of AAT, TGN, and ULAN in N-Triples refreshed monthly.

Licensing and Citations

Licensing

All Getty Vocabulary data is free to use under the terms of the Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-By) 1.0.

Citations

Use a general attribution to cite the Getty Vocabularies as a whole or Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) to identify a specific resource.

General

To attribute Getty Vocabularies under the Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-By) 1.0, please use the following credit line:

“Contains information from the J. Paul Getty Trust, Getty Research Institute, [full tool name], which is made available under the ODC Attribution License”

For example, to cite the Union List of Artist Names (ULAN), use:

“Contains information from the J. Paul Getty Trust, Getty Research Institute, Union List of Artist Names, which is made available under the ODC Attribution License”


Data in the Getty Vocabularies has been compiled from various institutional contributors using published sources. Along with Getty, cite the contributor and sources where appropriate in order to give due credit.

Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs)

URIs are short strings that uniquely identify a resource such as an HTML document, an image, a downloadable file, or a service. URLs and URNs are types of URIs.

URIs may be used to refer to the Getty Vocabulary records if incorporated in your data. Below are examples of short URIs that link to the full records and hierarchical displays of any Getty Vocabulary record. The number in the URI is the "subject_id" of the record.

Examples of URIs from each Vocabulary:

Art & Architecture Thesaurus® (AAT): rhyta

Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names® (TGN): Siena

Union List of Artist Names® (ULAN): Albrecht Dürer

Cultural Objects Name Authority® (CONA): Pantheon

Getty Iconography Authority™(IA): Reclining Buddha

Archived Data and Services

Getty no longer releases the Vocabularies in XML and relational table formats. To access final datasets in these formats (drawn on January 30, 2026), see AAT downloads, TGN downloads, and ULAN downloads. Each archived dataset carries its own documentation. Archived data will not be refreshed, although later updates may be added in the future.

Additionally, XMLweb services for AAT, TGN, and ULAN, which previously provided data that was regularly refreshed, have been discontinued. Users are encouraged to adapt their data pipelines to Linked Open Data (LOD) formats in preparation for this change and may contact the Getty Vocabulary Program for consultation on the transition.

CONA/IA web services data was last updated on January 30, 2026.

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