[Sigia-l] Taxonomy for Art related products

[Jonathan Broad]

Leslie Johnston wrote:
> It's a product of the Getty Trust (Getty Museum, Getty Research 
> Institute, Getty Conservation Institute, etc.), not Getty Images.  The 
> two are not related.

Well, they are *related*... :)  But I'm sure they're officially quite 
different.

> 
> The vocabularies are freely available, if you don't mind using the 
> public web interface to research the terms for your taxonomy.
> 
> If you want a machine copy of the entire taxonomy system, there is a 
> charge. I have no idea about cost.  System vendors in the museum and 
> visual resources world have licensed the AAT for bundling.

The data is what I'm interested in, but my company probably won't want 
to pay too much for it, because we won't use it outright (we have too 
many resources to manually categorize).  I want to use structured 
vocabularies (like the AAT, Wordnet, and various gazzetters and whatnot) 
as part of a machine-learning-driven automated mapping of uncontrolled 
keyword sets into a simplified, faceted system.

I don't have the patience to manually sort through their interface to 
reconstruct the underlying thesaurus.  I suppose I could write a screen 
scraper if it's only the convenience of a flat-file download that 
they're licensing, not the IP.  I rather doubt that's the case, but I 
could be wrong.

Ten years from now I hope there's a big network of open-source topic 
maps or RDFish ontologies to tap into and customize without losing 
interoperability.  Right now it seems it's still a roll-your-own world.

Thanks,
Jonathan