Cultural Objects Name Authority

The Cultural Objects Name Authority (CONA) is a project by the Getty Research Institute to create a controlled vocabulary containing authority records for cultural works, including architecture and movable works such as paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, manuscripts, photographs, textiles, ceramics, furniture, other visual media such as frescoes and architectural sculpture, performance art, archaeological artifacts, and various functional objects that are from the realm of material culture and of the type collected by museums. The focus of CONA is works cataloged in scholarly literature, museum collections, visual resources collections, archives, libraries, and indexing projects with a primary emphasis on art, architecture, or archaeology. The target users are the visual resources, academic, and museum communities.

In the CONA database, each work's record (also called a subject in the database, not to be confused with iconographical depicted subjects of art works) is identified by a unique numeric ID. Linked to each work's record are titles/names, current location, dates, other fields, related works, a parent (that is, a position in the hierarchy), sources for the data, and notes. By using terms from all four Getty Vocabularies to control many of these fields, CONA uses linked data principles to pull together multiple vocabularies in the creation of an authority file for works of art. The coverage of CONA is global, from prehistory through the present.

Detailed discussions regarding the Getty Vocabulary Program compiling a vocabulary comprising unique numeric identifiers and brief records for art works began in 2004. It was determined that various Getty projects collected data for movable works and architecture that could form an initial data set, upon which other contributors could build over time. The project was enthusiastically embraced by the user community. In 2005 mapping of the data model used for all three existing vocabularies (the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), the Thesaurus for Geographic Names (TGN), and the Union List of Artist Names (ULAN)) to potential CONA fields was completed. The effort coincided with the development of CCO (Cataloging Cultural Objects), a more concise offshoot of the CDWA (Categories for the Description of Works of Art), and CDWA Lite, which is an XML schema intended to serve as an exchange format for art information. Both CCO and CDWA, which reflect consensus in the user community of best practice in cataloging art and architecture, lay out the required fields and rules for cataloging art objects.

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