Getty AAT

Getty AAT
Name	Art & Architecture Thesaurus
Abbreviation	AAT
Publisher	J. Paul Getty Trust
Country	United States
Firstpub	1983
Format	Controlled vocabulary; structured ontology
Subjects	Art, Architecture, Design, Photography

Getty AAT

The Art & Architecture Thesaurus is a structured controlled vocabulary developed and maintained by the J. Paul Getty Trust for describing cultural heritage materials, visual resources, library collections, and museum documentation. It provides faceted, hierarchical, and associative terms to support cataloging and retrieval across institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, Smithsonian Institution, Louvre, British Museum and Rijksmuseum. Getty AAT facilitates interoperability between systems used by organizations including OCLC, Wikimedia Foundation, Europeana, Library of Congress, and UNESCO.

Overview

The thesaurus covers objects, physical attributes, production processes, agents, styles, periods, and locations relevant to art conservation, curatorial practice, and cultural heritage documentation. Its scope overlaps with vocabularies like the Library of Congress Subject Headings, ICONCLASS, Getty Vocabularies, CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model, and standards from International Organization for Standardization and Dublin Core. Institutions from the National Gallery of Art to regional archives employ the AAT for consistent description, enabling cross-search among repositories such as Internet Archive, Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Museo del Prado, Het Nieuwe Instituut, and Smithsonian American Art Museum.

History and development

Conceived in the late 1970s and first published in 1983 by the Getty Trust, the thesaurus evolved from earlier indexing efforts used by museums and libraries including the Getty Research Institute and the Image and Text Center. Early contributors included curators and catalogers from the Art Institute of Chicago and the National Portrait Gallery (United Kingdom). Over decades the AAT expanded through collaborative projects with institutions like the Getty Conservation Institute, International Council of Museums, American Alliance of Museums, and partnerships with national libraries including the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Major milestones include conversion to machine-readable formats, adoption of UTF-8 for multilingual labels to support partners such as National Diet Library and Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, and publication as linked data to align with initiatives from the W3C and Linked Open Data advocates.

Structure and content

AAT employs hierarchies (broader/narrower), facets, and associative relationships to model concepts such as object types, materials, techniques, styles, and attributes. It organizes terms within facets comparable to those used by the Victoria and Albert Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Centre Pompidou, and Museum of Modern Art. Each AAT concept record may include preferred terms, synonyms, scope notes, hierarchical placement, and references to sources like the Oxford English Dictionary, Grove Art Online, Benezit Dictionary of Artists, and exhibition catalogues from institutions like Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The dataset contains tens of thousands of unique concepts with multilingual equivalents to assist cataloging in environments from the National Museum of China to small regional galleries such as Kettle's Yard.

Data standards and interoperability

The AAT is distributed using standards such as Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), Resource Description Framework (RDF), and aligns with the CIDOC CRM for semantic mapping. These choices enable integration with library systems like Ex Libris, collection management systems like TMS (The Museum System), and digital asset management platforms used by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Smithsonian Institution. AAT mappings to vocabularies such as Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names, Union List of Artist Names, and external authorities including the Virtual International Authority File support authority control across portals such as Digital Public Library of America and research infrastructures like Europeana Research.

Usage and applications

Collections managers, catalogers, conservators, digital humanists, and scholars at institutions from the National Gallery (London) to university departments at Harvard University, University of Oxford, Yale University, and University of California, Los Angeles use the AAT to standardize descriptions, drive faceted search interfaces, and enable data sharing. Projects incorporating the thesaurus include semantic enrichment initiatives at the British Library, Linked Open Data conversions at the Rijksmuseum, and research visualization work at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Commercial vendors and open-source platforms such as CONTENTdm, Omeka, and CollectiveAccess incorporate AAT terms to improve discoverability for users searching across exhibitions, digitized archives, and teaching collections.

Governance and maintenance

The J. Paul Getty Trust, through units including the Getty Research Institute and the Getty Vocabulary Program, oversees editorial control, updates, and licensing. Governance involves advisory relations with professional bodies such as the Society of American Archivists and the Cataloguing Cultural Objects (CCO) community, and collaborations with national institutions like the National Library of Australia and Library and Archives Canada. Maintenance cycles accommodate user feedback, editorial proposals from institutions like the American Alliance of Museums and scholarly input from universities such as Columbia University and University of Cambridge, ensuring the thesaurus remains current for curatorial, conservation, and digital scholarship practices.

Category:Thesauri