Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

Places in TGN include administrative political entities (e.g., cities, nations) and physical features (e.g., mountains, rivers).

They contain terms, names, and other information about people, places, things, and concepts relating to art, architecture, and material culture.

[1] Work on the TGN began in 1987, when the Getty created a department dedicated to compiling and distributing terminology, at that time called the Vocabulary Coordination Group.

The development of TGN was informed by an international study completed by the Thesaurus Artis Universalis (TAU), a working group of the Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art (CIHA), and by the consensus reached at a colloquium held in 1991, attended by the spectrum of potential users of geographic vocabulary in cataloging and scholarship of art and architectural history and archaeology.

The TGN grows and changes via contributions from the user community and editorial work of the Getty Vocabulary Program.

The basic principles under which the TGN is constructed and maintained were established by the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) and also employed for the Union List of Artist Names (ULAN): Its scope includes terminology needed to catalog and retrieve information about the visual arts and architecture; it is constructed using national and international standards for thesaurus construction; it comprises a hierarchy with tree structures corresponding to the current and historical worlds; it is based on terminology that is current, warranted for use by authoritative literary sources, and validated by use in the scholarly art and architectural history community; and it is compiled and edited in response to the needs of the user community.

TGN has been constructed over the years by numerous members of the user community and an army of dedicated editors, under the supervision of several managers.

Within the Physical Features facets are mountain ranges, oceans, seas, rivers, waterfalls, island groups, and deserts.