News from the Getty Vocabulary Program
Upcoming changes to the data structure: Changes have been made in the
structure of all three Getty vocabularies (AAT, ULAN, and TGN) to allow
for the seamless integration of multilingual terms. One significant
change is that the Qualifier field is now linked to language (which has
multiple occurrences per Term), to better accommodate qualifiers in
multilingual data. Originally, there was only one qualifier per term;
however, the same term may be appropriate for multiple languages, while
the qualifier for different languages should be different (e.g.,
English: gouache (paint), Spanish: gouache (pintura); French: gouache
(pientre)). In other words, while language was always repeating for each
Term, now with the revised data structure, the Qualifier will also be
repeating for each term. In addition, the Term Type was moved to the
language link (because, for example, the same term could be a Descriptor
in one language, but a Used For term in another language). We have added
a Language Status flag, which will eventually be used to flag loan
terms. The Scope Note is now multilingual, so there are multiple
occurrences of SN, and it is linked to language. Another change is that
the hierarchical relationship type is now linked to the hierarchical
relationship as a separate field, whereas it had previously been stored
in the relationship “historical flag” field. The Hierarchical
Relationship Type records the thesaural standards’ codes for the type
of relationship between child and parent: BTP (part/whole or partitive),
BTG (genus/species or generic), or BTI (instance of). The new data
dictionary will be posted soon.
When will these changes be implemented? The new data structure will be
included in the June 2010 licensed data file releases. It will appear in
the Web services data, online “browser” displays, Web contribution
forms, and import XML schema in early 2010. For those of you who copy
and paste from the Web “browsers,” the descriptor will still
continue to display with the qualifier in parentheses, so you will be
able to highlight and copy term-plus-qualifier as you are now accustomed
to doing. For questions or comments, please write to [log in to unmask] .
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