The Cultural Objects Name Authority (CONA) is a project by the Getty Research Institute to create a controlled vocabulary containing authority records for cultural works, including architecture and movable works such as paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, manuscripts, photographs, textiles, ceramics, furniture, other visual media such as frescoes and architectural sculpture, performance art, archaeological artifacts, and various functional objects that are from the realm of material culture and of the type collected by museums.
In 2005 mapping of the data model used for all three existing vocabularies (the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN), and the Union List of Artist Names (ULAN)) to potential CONA fields was completed.
The effort coincided with the development of CCO (Cataloging Cultural Objects), a more concise offshoot of the CDWA (Categories for the Description of Works of Art), and CDWA Lite, which is an XML schema intended to serve as an exchange format for art information.
The editorial system and online search screens for CONA are similar to those used for the existing Getty vocabularies.
As with the AAT, TGN, and ULAN, CONA will grow and change via contributions from the user community and editorial work of the Getty Vocabulary Program.
Administratively, the Vocabulary Program resides under the GRI Collection Management and Description Division (David Farneth, Head).
It is useful to separate the two types of works—built works and movable works—into different facets in CONA because movable works typically are located in a repository, have a repository identification number, have a provenance of former locations, and other characteristics that typically differ from architecture.
[7] The minimum fields are the following: Catalog Level, Object/Work Type, Title or Name, Creator, Creation Date, Measurements, Materials and Techniques, Depicted Subject, and Current Location.