Long grounded within the western tradition, the discipline of art history still wrestles with its ambition to become a global field. To this end, today’s art historians endeavor to broaden the field’s canons, by actively recovering previously unknown artists’ legacies and underrepresented visual traditions from around the world. This work is both reparative and additive. It also portends an ever-expanding scope and purview for the field. The Getty Vocabularies serve, collectively, as one evolving site to grapple with and represent this broader aspiration for an increasingly global, inclusive, and expansive art history. Originally conceived as a resource for cataloging, the Getty Vocabularies have taken on a whole host of purposes, inviting the participation of new audiences and a new range of scholarly outcomes and technological uses.

The Getty Vocabularies were founded in the early 1980s, in keeping with the J. Paul Getty Trust's broad mission to share the world’s art and culture. At that time, the Art History Information Program (AHIP), an operating program of the Getty, seized on the promise of data-driven approaches to art history and cultural heritage. Positioned at the center of AHIP’s endeavors were a set of structured terminology resources: the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), the Union List of Artist Names (ULAN), and the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN), which were first issued in massive print volumes and then transitioned into searchable databases. (Harpring 2010) Today, AAT, ULAN, and TGN include millions of records related to art, architecture, and cultural heritage, and are managed under the purview of the Getty Research Institute’s Division of Research and Knowledge Creation. The Vocabularies are fully multilingual in the scope of their content, with over 600 hundred languages represented across AAT, ULAN, and TGN. (Silva 2022) Additionally, translated versions of the AAT are sustained by peer organizations in Taiwan and Chile. (AAT Taiwan and Tesauro de Arte & Arquitectura)

Released as Linked Open Data in 2013, the Getty Vocabularies also sit at the heart of semantic information networks. (Cobb 2015) For instance, LinkedArt, a widely used metadata profile, requires and encourages the use of AAT in its model. (LinkedArt) Moreover, large and small language models are being trained on the AAT, as a key source for high-quality, structured, and domain specific data. (Net et.al) Today, the Vocabularies are continually growing, widely adopted as authoritative resources for the art cataloging community worldwide and serving as the anchor for many digital humanities projects. The historic data is also constantly subject to revision, with the goal of supporting respectful, inclusive, and updated terminologies in close collaboration with source communities.

This presentation takes stock of the Vocabularies’ opportunities and challenges in serving the needs of a multi-sited and increasingly global scholarly community, as the art historical canon expands and evolves. Although they were originally conceived as instruments to capture and represent art historical data, the Getty Vocabularies have the potential, in today’s increasingly networked world, to both widen and contest the evolving contours of the field. Far more than invisible infrastructure, the Vocabularies can redefine accepted art historical canons, while serving as a locus for original scholarly expression and ultimately disciplinary validation. While the value of these authority resources is fully recognized in library and information science communities, art historians are generally less attuned to their potential. This paper aims to highlight the evolving importance and opportunities for the Getty Vocabularies in the sphere of research and scholarship.

At the center of this discussion is a key collaborative case study, between the Getty Research Institute and the National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage (NRICH) in the Republic of Korea. As a national institution charged with the research, excavation, preservation, and restoration of Korea’s cultural heritage, NRICH sought to share Korean art-historical data internationally and to broaden the foundations of research on Korean art. Thus, NRICH contributed 1,100 Korean artist records to ULAN between 2023 and 2024, and in 2024 the two institutions formalized the collaboration through an agreement on exchange and cooperation. NRICH is now extending this work by developing metadata for Korean art-historical terminology to be incorporated into the AAT. (Yoo 2024)

NRICH’s engagement with ULAN was motivated in particular by the database’s commitment to representing artists across national and regional boundaries. As of early 2023, Korean artists were only minimally represented within ULAN. To address this gap, NRICH launched a systematic metadata-building initiative. Drawing on the Dictionary of Korean Painters and Calligraphers through the Centuries (2011)—a comprehensive print reference covering artists active from the Three Kingdoms period (beginning in 37 BCE) through 1945—the Institute compiled records for 400 artists in 2023 and an additional 700 in 2024, contributing a total of 1,100 Korean artists to ULAN. (NRICH 2011)

The naming conventions of premodern Korea are notably complex, involving multiple layers—given name, ja (courtesy name), ho (pen name), and other appellations—that coexist within a single individual’s identity. Kings possessed distinct categories of names, including given name, ja , gunho (prince title), temple name, posthumous title, and honorific title. Buddhist monk-painters typically used dangho (monastic appellation) rather than given names, often resulting in identical or similarly pronounced names. Many women artists also worked under professional names or dangho (art name) rather than birth names. The legacy of the Sinosphere further complicates matters, as names continue to be recorded in both Hangul (the Korean alphabet) and Hanja (Chinese characters). Although the Revised Romanization system was adopted in 2000, the older McCune–Reischauer system, with its use of diacritics, persists in some scholarly publications, creating additional variation. In response, NRICH developed metadata within Getty ULAN that records multiple name forms and Romanization variants, thereby enabling clearer differentiation among individuals with identical names, the separation of historically conflated figures, and the consolidation of cases in which a single individual had been treated as multiple figures in earlier scholarship.

The “associative relationships” component of the Getty Vocabularies provides a key mechanism for representing the social and professional networks of Korean artists. According to the ULAN Editorial Guidelines, these are managed through reciprocal “Relationship Types” linking individuals or groups through professional, familial, or institutional ties such as teacher–student, corporate membership, and family lineages. Using controlled types (e.g., parent of, teacher of, friend of, colleague of, influenced by ), ULAN ensures bidirectional links between records. This direct linkage model enables the reconstruction of the genealogical, institutional, and social networks centered on an artist, allowing researchers to identify related figures connected through defined relationships.

Historically, Korean artists occupied multiple roles, including court painters ( hwawon ), monk-painters ( hwaseung ), women artists, members of the royal family, painters, and calligraphers. Court painters often formed hereditary lineages across generations; for example, Baek Yeongbae (1824-1879) inherited painter status through both paternal and maternal lines. Buddhist monk-painters maintained lineage ties within monastic networks and affiliated temples while collaborating across regional or factional boundaries. Some figures combined roles as kings and practicing artists, or as government officials who were painters or calligraphers. Women artists also occupied multifaceted positions: some were female entertainers ( gisaeng ) who received artistic training from scholar-officials, while others were accomplished painters as well as mothers of prominent literati. By structuring these identity-based networks as metadata and connecting them through ULAN’s controlled relationship types—such as apprenticeship, family lineages, and monk-painter networks—it becomes possible to recover artists previously overlooked or marginalized in Korean art history. Within a rich knowledge graph, these connections illuminate patterns of artistic and social exchange, expanding the field’s interpretive scope.

Summer 2026 represents an opportune time to reflect on the future scholarly potential of the Getty Vocabularies, as a major technical refresh project is currently underway, with the aim of modernizing the infrastructure and interface of AAT, ULAN, and TGN, scheduled to launch in 2026. The paper will point to work that has already been undertaken and what kinds of shifts can be expected for the next stage in the life of the Getty Vocabularies.