Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

The Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (abbreviated TGN or GTGN) is a product of the J. Paul Getty Trust included in the Getty Vocabulary Program. The TGN includes names and associated information about places. Places in TGN include administrative political entities (e.g., cities, nations) and physical features (e.g., mountains, rivers). Current and historical places are included. Other information related to history, population, culture, art and architecture is included.

The resource is available to museums, art libraries, archives, visual resource collection catalogers, bibliographic projects through private license or available to members of the general public for free on the Getty Vocabulary website (see external links).

The Getty vocabulary databases (Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), Union List of Artist Names (ULAN), and TGN) are produced and maintained by the Getty Vocabulary Program. They are compliant with ISO and NISO standards for thesaurus construction. They contain terms, names, and other information about people, places, things, and concepts relating to art, architecture, and material culture.

The Getty vocabularies can be used in three ways: at the data entry stage, by catalogers or indexers who are describing works of art, architecture, material culture, archival materials, visual surrogates, or bibliographic materials; as knowledge bases, providing information for researchers; and as search assistants to enhance end-user access to online resources.

Work on the TGN began in 1987, when the Getty created a department dedicated to compiling and distributing terminology, at that time called the Vocabulary Coordination Group. The AAT was already being managed by the Getty at that time, and the Getty attempted to respond to requests from the creators of art information for additional controlled vocabularies for artists' names (ULAN) and geographic names (TGN). The development of TGN was informed by an international study completed by the Thesaurus Artis Universalis (TAU), a working group of the Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art (CIHA), and by the consensus reached at a colloquium held in 1991, attended by the spectrum of potential users of geographic vocabulary in cataloging and scholarship of art and architectural history and archaeology. The initial core of the TGN was compiled from thousands of geographic names in use by various Getty cataloging and indexing projects, enlarged by information from U. S. government databases, and further enhanced by the manual entry of information from published hard-copy sources. The TGN grows and changes via contributions from the user community and editorial work of the Getty Vocabulary Program.

...
Wikipedia