Robert Sanderson
Semantic Architect
J. Paul Getty Trust
Joshua Gomez
Senior Software Engineer
Getty Research Institute
The Getty is comprised of several programs, each of which maintains their own art historical datasets. In an institution wide effort to integrate both systems and content, several projects have started to build and publish linked open data (LOD) versions of those traditional and disparate databases. A clear example is the 17th century painting of Madame Bonnier de la Mosson, which is owned by the Museum, described in art dealer stock books in the Research Institute, and both the painter and the sitter have identities in the Getty Vocabularies, managed by the Trust. This presentation will describe progress made on the technical, social and political challenges uncovered during this ongoing and transformative process. Examples of these challenges include information ownership versus stewardship and the impact that has on URI creation, change management and notification across distributed data, and agreement on modeling of art historical objects and related resources.