Libraries have cataloged the world's published record for over a century, but that description sits as text inside records rather than as identifiable things. We have spent the past several years rebuilding it as a knowledge graph. WorldCat Entities publishes descriptions of people, events, places, organizations, and works as persistent, resolvable URIs. The Dewey Decimal Classification is published on the same basis, which turns a familiar classification scheme into a machine-navigable hierarchy of human knowledge.

Context

The Getty, based in Los Angeles, is a unique cultural institution, combining an art museum, library, archive, foundation, and conservation science program. Shared across all of these is a deep commitment to creating, managing, and sharing knowledge of the visual arts—as well as building the cultural heritage field's capacity to work with this information.

What we have done