Ulan

ULAN, the Union List of Artist Names, is a controlled vocabulary maintained by the Getty Research Institute as part of the Getty Vocabularies. It provides standardized names for artists, architects, and related figures to support consistent cataloging and information retrieval across museums, libraries, and archives.

Entries in ULAN include a preferred name, variant spellings, life dates where known, nationalities, and short biographical notes. Each record also includes relationships to works, places, disciplines, and other names, along with cross-references to related terms in other vocabularies. The dataset is linked to broader authority data and is designed to help disambiguate individuals with similar names.

History and scope: ULAN was developed by the Getty as part of efforts to standardize art information. It encompasses hundreds of thousands of names representing historical and contemporary figures in the arts and related fields, and it is continually updated.

Usage and interoperability: ULAN is used to normalize names in catalogs, collections databases, and digital libraries to improve search and interoperability. It integrates with other Getty vocabularies, such as the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) and the Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN), and can be linked to external authority files such as VIAF or ISNI in linked data environments.

Access: The vocabulary is accessible online via the Getty Vocabularies site. Updates are released periodically, and the data can be browsed and searched. Bulk licensing or data reuse agreements may apply for large-scale use.

See also Getty Vocabularies, AAT, TGN, linked data.