Conservation thesaurus

The Getty Conservation Institute is embarking on the development of
a conservation thesaurus to improve consistency in indexing the
professional literature, enable users of AATA Online to perform
vocabulary-assisted searches, and ultimately facilitate cataloguing
and retrieval of conservation holdings. Unlike a dictionary or
glossary, a thesaurus does not dictate usage and is not simply a
controlled vocabulary. It is a grouping of unique concepts,
organized hierarchically by themes and topics. It brings together
synonyms, broader and narrower contexts, and other related concepts.
As with the Getty's other vocabulary databases--the Art and
Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), the Union List of Artist Names (ULAN),
and the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN)--the conservation
thesaurus will be accessible online free of charge.

The GCI looks forward to working with members of the field
throughout the course of the project. As a first step, we would be
grateful for information on any related initiatives, either in the
past or currently underway, so that we can learn from these
experiences and avoid duplicating efforts. Although the structure of
the thesaurus will be English-based, we are interested in knowing
about similar projects using other languages in order to eventually
incorporate varied terms in multiple languages.

Please direct your comments to Janet Bridgland <janetb27<-a t->tds< . >net>,
who is coordinating the project on our behalf. Thank you for your
assistance.


                                  ***
                  Conservation DistList Instance 22:33
                Distributed: Saturday, December 6, 2008
                       Message Id: cdl-22-33-002
                                  ***