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News

Nomenclature terminology updates

March 2022

A list of significant changes that have been made since Nomenclature was published online in 2018 can be found on the “Updates” page in the “History of Changes” section. Highlights of Nomenclature development over the past few years include:

• the regular addition of new concepts that have been requested by the museum community and approved by the Nomenclature Committee of AASLH and the Canadian Nomenclature Committee. Many of these new concepts include definitions and bibliographic references.
• updates to existing concepts, including changes to object names, improvements to definitions, and the addition of images
• a significant revision of the Arts hierarchy, completed in March 2022. The hierarchy was modified to follow clearer principles of organization, add some key art terms that were missing, balance the level of specificity of terms, and bring Nomenclature more in line with the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT). Definitions were added for all concepts. Co-referencing with AAT concepts is now underway and is expected to be completed in a few months. The revision to the Arts hierarchy will make Nomenclature more relevant to museums with artworks in their collections.
• the addition of Canadian spellings and “Canadianisms” by the Canadian Nomenclature Committee.

Review the “History of Changes” section to see what’s new in Nomenclature!

Nomenclature bibliography improvements

November 2020

The Nomenclature bibliography has been enhanced with the addition of links to full-text online versions of many reference materials relating to general and specific types of objects. Organized following the Nomenclature category and class hierarchy, the bibliography can be used by museums to facilitate research and cataloging.

Concept-specific bibliographic references have been added for many Nomenclature terms added since 2019, and these can be viewed within the full record display. For example, see the “Bibliographic citation” field in the “Girder” record.

The bibliography is a work in progress that will be enhanced as new concepts are added to Nomenclature, or as older ones are revised. To submit a recommendation for inclusion in the bibliography, please use the Submission form.

Nomenclature concept display embedded in your Website

September 2020

You can now embed a view of the Nomenclature concepts within your own online tools, using stylesheets (CSS) to match the look and layout of your own web pages. For information on how to use this feature, see the Integration page.

Natural Order for Nomenclature Display

September 2020

Throughout its long history as a print resource, multi-word preferred terms within the English version of Nomenclature for Museum Cataloguing were presented in inverted order (e.g. Chair, Rocking) instead of natural order (Rocking Chair). Inverted order served to group like items together alphabetically in the printed book index. Since the launch of the online version of Nomenclature in 2018, inverted order continued to be offered as the default display (with option to toggle to natural order).

Beginning in late 2020 or early 2021, the Nomenclature website will use the natural order as the primary display for multi-word terms. This change should have minimal practical impact on Nomenclature users (although it is acknowledged that many users have become accustomed over many years to the inverted display order). There is no need for museums that are using inverted order to switch to natural order. Inverted order will remain a completely valid version of the preferred term, and will continue to be:

• Searchable
• Displayed in the Nomenclature record display as a valid alternative preferred term
• Maintained within the Nomenclature dataset and included for all new terms
• Included in all downloadable files (spreadsheets and RDF)
• Included in the embedded RDF within the Nomenclature HTML page headers

The inverted order terms will also be available via the future Nomenclature SPARQL endpoint and APIs.

The change to natural order as the primary Nomenclature display is being undertaken for several reasons:

• with the advent of powerful search options to replace the printed book index, it is no longer necessary to rely on inverted order to find the terms you need
• Standards for thesaurus construction recommend natural order for multi-word terms
• Maintaining two primary display options (natural and inverted order) is not sustainable as Nomenclature is offered in more formats and in a variety of web services
• Other controlled vocabularies such as the Art & Architecture Thesaurus, Library of Congress Subject Headings, the Thesaurus for Graphic Materials, and many others, use natural order as their primary display. These resources are often used to complement or even match concepts with Nomenclature, so it is helpful for users to have a consistent format for display.

It is hoped that this transition will have minimal impact for museums that use Nomenclature, but will simplify the nomenclature web presentation and services while facilitating coordination and matching with other complementary controlled vocabularies.

For more information, please contact CHIN.

Nomenclature matched with other vocabularies

March 2020

Thanks to the editorial staff at the Getty Vocabulary Program, all concepts in Nomenclature are now matched (co-referenced) with concepts in the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT). Each Nomenclature concept now has an AAT identification number, and Nomenclature identification numbers have been added to the AAT concepts. The Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) is using these matches to match Nomenclature concepts with other vocabulary sources that have AAT co-references.

The work of matching Nomenclature concepts to Wikidata has also started. An automated match using the Wikidata Mix’n’match tool resulted in approximately 50% of Nomenclature concepts being matched. We are seeking volunteers to help continue this work. For more information on how to get involved, please contact CHIN or consult Mix’n’match/Manual.

As of March 2020, the quantities of matched concepts in Nomenclature were as follows:

• 14,691 AAT concepts: exact matches identified by Getty Vocabulary Program
• 4,016 Wikidata concepts: matched via AAT co-referencing and manual matches from the Mix’n’match tool
• 1,470 Culture.fr (French only) concepts: exact matches on preferred French terms to
  • Thésaurus de la désignation des objets mobiliers
  • Thésaurus de la désignation des œuvres architecturales et des espaces aménagés
  • Liste d'autorités Dénomination - Joconde
  • Liste d'autorité Typologie documentaire pour l'indexation des archives locales
• 82 Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) concepts: matched via AAT co-referencing
• 152 Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF) (French only) concepts from the RAMEAU index of subject terms: matched via AAT, LCSH or Culture.fr co-referencing

Matches will be increased and improved over time. All of the co-references to external vocabulary sources appear as links in Nomenclature under the Other references to this concept tab in the record for a particular concept.

Additional formats for downloading Nomenclature

March 2020

Several new options for downloading Nomenclature have been added to the Integration page.

• In addition to the JSON-LD format, you can now obtain the RDF download as Turtle or RDF/XML.
• In addition to the Excel spreadsheet, you can also download an Open Document spreadsheet (.ods) version.

Descriptive information about Nomenclature

March 2020

Machine-readable information describing the Nomenclature dataset and ontology has now been provided to allow semantic agents to more easily find, register, summarize, analyze and consume Nomenclature linked open data. Information on Nomenclature’s content, structure, licensing, access, properties and classes, as well as basic statistics are included. Consult the Integration page for more information.

Nomenclature as open data

January 2020

Nomenclature is now freely available in a number of formats! Previously only available for purchase or as a reference website, Nomenclature is now available as Open Data.

It is available in the following formats:

• Excel file download
• RDF files downloads (.jsonld, .ttl, and .rdf). SKOS now available, other options coming soon.

The Canadian Heritage Information Network is working to open a SPARQL endpoint and an API – watch for news on these options in the future.

See the Integration page on the Nomenclature site for available options.

Per-entity RDF embedded in Nomenclature’s HTML pages

January 2020

Each concept page in Nomenclature has the RDF for that concept embedded as JSON-LD in the HTML header for the page. This per-entity RDF can be used by semantic web crawlers, and can provide Nomenclature data to the web services of other cultural heritage datastores that have embedded Nomenclature URIs.

Information on the data model for Nomenclature is found on the Integration page of the Nomenclature site.

New concepts added to Nomenclature

January 2020

Nomenclature is now continuously updated, and is not published in versions. Since the publication of the last paper volume (Nomenclature 4.0) in 2015, the Nomenclature Task Force has been updating its process for reviewing terms that are submitted by the museum community as candidate terms for Nomenclature. Since Nomenclature is now a bilingual resource that includes Canadian variants, a separate Canadian Task Force for Nomenclature has been created to ensure that French terminology and Canadianisms are added. A large backlog of submitted terms has now been approved in both English and French, and added to Nomenclature.

To see what changes and additions have been made to Nomenclature since Nomenclature 4.0 in 2015, see the History of Changes section on the Nomenclature website.

New Canadian Task Force for Nomenclature launched

November 2019

The Canadian Task Force for Nomenclature (CTFN) is a new sub-group of the Nomenclature Task Force. The CTFN will be responsible for ensuring that

• all preferred terminology is bilingual (English and French);
• Canadian term variants and spellings are included where warranted;
• the terminology needs of Canadian museums are met. This will involve
  • soliciting and coordinating Canadian terminology submissions,
  • recruiting Canadian participants for terminology development projects; and
• news about Nomenclature is shared in Canada.

The Canadian Task Force for Nomenclature currently consists of the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) and Parks Canada staff with specialized Nomenclature experience and 10 Canadian museum representatives, representing various regions and linguistic profiles. Members are appointed for a one-year period, which can be extended.

If you have a working knowledge of the Nomenclature system and are interested in being a part of the Canadian Task Force for Nomenclature, please contact CHIN.

Art & Architecture Thesaurus matched to Nomenclature

November 2019

A project to co-reference Nomenclature and the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) is in progress through a collaboration with the Getty Research Institute’s Getty Vocabulary Program. This project has the following benefits for users of both the AAT and Nomenclature :

• Approximately 15,000 French terms that the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) has provided as equivalents to Nomenclature concepts and are now available in the Art & Architecture Thesaurus; and
• Where Nomenclature concepts match AAT concepts, links are being established in both the AAT and Nomenclature. The matched AAT concepts appear as links under the Other references to this concept tab in the Nomenclature concept display; however, in future the actual matching values/URIs from the AAT will appear on the Nomenclature website. This will be helpful as a reference to cataloguers using Nomenclature, i.e. as an easy way to access the same concept in the AAT.

Editorial staff at the Getty Vocabulary Program have undertaken the co-referencing of the two vocabularies. Many matches have already been established, and more will be added over time.

CHIN plans to add links to matching concepts in other vocabularies over time, particularly French sources.

Autocomplete suggestions

October 2019

Users can now access a list of autocomplete term suggestions based on the letters you type in the search box. This new feature facilitates and speeds up searches by suggesting terms in Nomenclature that correspond to the letters entered.

As soon as you type three letters in the Search field, the system looks for all entries containing those three letters among preferred and non-preferred terms in English and French, and displays them in a drop-down menu below the Search field. Simply select the desired term from the list and click the Search button.

For example, if you are looking for the term “cement mixer”, as soon as you type the three first letters “cem”, a list of four terms will be displayed :

• Apparatus, Cement Vicat
• Injector, Cement
• Kiln, Cement
• Mixer, Concrete

As illustrated, Nomenclature recommends the use of “Mixer, Concrete” as the preferred term, and this term appears in the list even though it does not include the letters “cem.” This is because the terms “cement mixer” and “mixer, cement” are associated with it as non-preferred terms.

Note that the suggestions display according to the language selected for the user interface. When searching for “cem” in the French interface, the terms displayed in the list are in French :

• Appareil de vicat pour ciment (the French equivalent for “Apparatus, Cement Vicat”)
• Bétonnière (for “Mixer, Concrete”)
• Four à ciment (for “Kiln, Cement”)
• Injecteuse de ciment (for “Injector, Cement”)

The order in which suggested terms display depends on the user’s selection for term order and linguistic variant.

User guidelines for the transition from the Parks Canada classification system to Nomenclature for Museum Cataloging

September 2019

Nomenclature for Museum Cataloging has now replaced the Parks Canada Descriptive and Visual Dictionary of Objects (Parks DVD). Parks DVD users who transition to Nomenclature for Museum Cataloging will find the new classification system very similar, with most of the same terms. However, some terms have been changed, moved or removed, and there are slight differences in a few of the classifications. To help with the transition, the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) has prepared the web resource User guidelines for the transition from the Parks Canada classification system to Nomenclature for Museum Cataloging. As well, the term and classification ID numbers from the Parks DVD are included in Nomenclature, and these numbers are searchable. Use these numbers to locate Parks terms in the new system. CHIN has also kept the original files from the Parks DVD, as archived in 2016, in Excel format. They are available upon request.

Canadian term variants added to Nomenclature website

November 2018

Users can now toggle between International and Canadian term variants. A few Canadian terms already exist in Nomenclature (for example, the English-Canadian spelling of “Armour” and the French-Canadian term “Godendard”), and more will be added in time. Suggestions for Canadian variants can be submitted to the Canadian Task Force for Nomenclature by contacting CHIN.

Other features will be added in future – stay tuned for news!

Launch of “Beta” version of Nomenclature

September 2018

The Nomenclature Task Force of the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) , the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) and Parks Canada have collaborated to produce this new bilingual, illustrated online version of Nomenclature for Museum Cataloging! This website is the most up-to-date version of the Nomenclature standard and includes:

• the entire Nomenclature 4.0, as published in 2015 by Rowman & Littlefield;
• a complete French version, with terms provided by Parks Canada and CHIN;
• terminology, definitions and illustrations added through a harmonization process^{Footnote *} with a complementary standard, the Parks Canada Descriptive and Visual Dictionary of Objects (Parks DVD);
• a bibliography to help museums find additional resources to help with cataloging specific types of objects;
• guidelines and tips on how to use the Nomenclature system.

This fully bilingual, illustrated version of Nomenclature allows museums to search for terms or browse through the classification hierarchy in English or French.

The Nomenclature Task Force will continue to develop and maintain the Nomenclature standard in consultation with museums that use it. Updates will be included on a routine basis in the online resource, allowing organizations to stay current with the standard in a more timely fashion.

CHIN plans to release the Nomenclature data as linked open data under an Open Data Commons “Attribution” license in 2020, which will mean that Nomenclature data will be free to download and use at that time.

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History of changes

Date modified:

2022-05-05