How Forcible are Right Words! *: Overview of Applications and Interfaces Incorporating the Getty Vocabularies

This paper explores the current and potential implementations of the three Getty vocabularies (the Art & Architecture Thesaurus® (AAT), the Union List of Artist Names® (ULAN), and the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names?(TGN)) as they may be employed as 1) "knowledge bases" for researchers wishing to learn about the concepts they describe; 2) sources of vocabulary for catalog records for art and cultural heritage; and 3) sources of names (including variant spellings, names in various languages, and historical names) for use in retrieval tools to gain access to art and cultural heritage information across different resources in digital form. The discussion focuses particularly on the vocabularies as they may be implemented on the World Wide Web, outlining the strengths, weaknesses, and issues surrounding such implementations.