Projet de recherche BL/39/FWI21 (Action de recherche BL)
Summary
Challenge and project objectives :
The project will tackle the problem of the partially missing French translations in the “Art and Architecture Thesaurus” (AAT). This multilingual thesaurus has been developed since the late 1970’s by the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, specifically by the department Getty Vocabulary Program. The Art and Architecture Thesaurus is used worldwide by museums. Since 2014 the AAT has also connected to the semantic web as it was published as Linked Open Data.
The AAT – along with other thesauri published by the Getty such as the Thesaurus Geographical Names (TGN) and the Union List of Artist Names (ULAN) – is considered an international standard, that can be used as a cataloguing, retrieval and research tool. It is the “glue” that can connect cultural heritage collections no matter what local CMS or language you use to digitize a cultural heritage collection.
Examples of the exploitation of the AAT can be found in several European funded projects, such as the AthenaPlus project, funded as a Best Practice Network from 2013-2016; or the Partage Plus, fund as a ICT Policy Support Programme from 2012-2014. In these projects, the AAT was used as an enrichment tool for the content published on the European catalogue Europeana. This was done via the MINT-tool, a web-based platform that was designed and developed by the NTUA (Athens, Greece) to facilitate aggregation initiatives for cultural heritage content and metadata in Europe.
The popularity of the AAT is still growing, due to its elaborate scope and hierarchic structure and its compliance with ISO and NISO standards. However, the most powerful feature of the AAT is its multilingualism and as such becoming an international standard. Several translation campaigns have been set up in order to achieve this goal:
- English language (original)
- Dutch language (RKD in The Netherlands and KIK-IRPA in Belgium, AAT-editorial board)
- Spanish language: Lina Nagel Vega, Centro de Documentación de Bienes Patrimoniales | Chile
- Chinese language: Shu-Jiun (Sophy) Chen, Academia Sinica | Taiwan
- German language: Monika Hagedorn-Saupe, State Museums of Berlin/Institute for Museum Research | Germany
- French: A number of concepts in the AAT has been translated into French in the past, thanks to the Canadian Heritage Information Network.
The BEINFRAT-project wants to bring key players from the French speaking community together and strengthen the collaboration in order to create a network of cultural heritage institutions that can help add French concepts to this international standard while sharing expertise.
