Getty - Art and Architecture Thesaurus Concepts (AATC) - an AAT slim

Report

See https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15487726

AATC - Art and Architecture Thesaurus Concepts - a simplified controlled vocabulary

The AATC is a SKOS concept scheme that restructures the concepts from the Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) into a flat controlled vocabulary, and excludes non-concepts, such as facets, hierarchies and guide terms.

The result is a controlled vocabulary where each term is a skos:Concept, member of aatc: skos:ConceptScheme and includes:

• English(@en), and when available Dutch(@nl) labels (skos:prefLabel)
• scope notes (skos:scopeNote)
• matching concepts (skos:exactMatch), often Wikidata items
• source (dcterms:source)

Example turtle (RDF) representation of concept aat:300054402 oral history (discipline):

aat:300054402
  a skos:Concept ;
  dc:source <http://www.getty.edu/research-institute/>, <http://vocab.getty.edu/> ;
  skos:exactMatch wd:Q558929 ;
  skos:inScheme aatc:aatconcepts ;
  skos:prefLabel "oral history (vakgebied)"@nl, "oral history (discipline)"@en ;
  skos:scopeNote "History in which historical information is recorded, or histories are presented, in the form of audible speech or song."@en .

Deprecated terms are also included, and identified with the statements owl:deprecated true and dc:isReplacedBy aatc:XYZ.

Output: aatc.ttl

Motivation

AATC development was motivated by the need to index AAT terms in a Skosmos server, so that AAT terms could be used easily queried via the Skosmos API and easily used by software applications to classify data with AAT terms.

Since our current use-cases, that called for the us of AAT concepts, were not concerned with parent/child relation between concepts, we have decided to remove the hierarchical relations of AAT. Instead, we focused on creating a flat controlled vocabulary, containing all concepts that included English labels.

AATC Creation & Validation

The script aatc_generate.py performs the generation of the AATC, via a CONSTRUCT SPARQL query, that transforms the query result onto a new structure, saved in the RDF based turtle file aatc.ttl (~8Mb).

• requirements: SPARQLWrapper

The script aatc_validate.py only performs the validation of the AATC agains the aatc_shacl.ttl SHACL rules. If the validation fails, script will output an AssertionError

• requirements: rdflib, pyshacl
• also possible to run shape with Apache Jena's SHACL command shacl v --shapes aatc_shacl.ttl --data aatc.ttl

AATC Testing

Loading into Skosmos

from this directory run:
.skosmos-load-aatc.sh

this script will clone Skosmos onto Skomos/; append aatc Skosmos configuration to Skosmos/dockerfiles/config/config-docker-compose.ttl; create the Skosmos + Fuseki docker containers; load the aatc.ttl onto Fuseki.

If all goes well the AATC will be available at http://localhost:9090/AATC/

• resources.md(resources.md) provides a list of the documentation that was consulted in the process of creating the landscape analysis.