Nomenclature for Museum Cataloging is now free for download in a number of formats! 

The Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) and AASLH are happy to announce that Nomenclature has been released under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence and is available as linked open data (LOD). Users will no longer need to purchase a book or electronic file to stay current with this cataloging standard, and software vendors will no longer have to pay a licensing fee for its use.

The data you can now download for free includes:

  • the entire Nomenclature 4.0 (published in 2015);
  • terminology, definitions, illustrations and bibliographic references from the Parks Canada Descriptive and Visual Dictionary of Objects (Parks DVD);
  • a complete French version;
  • links to related concepts in other vocabularies such as the Art & Architecture Thesaurus; and
  • Canadian variants of Nomenclature concepts, where warranted.

The AASLH Nomenclature Task Force and the Canadian Task Force for Nomenclature will regularly update the standard in both French and English, in consultation with the museums that use it.

You can download Nomenclature in the following formats:

  • Excel
  • RDF (.jsonld)

The Nomenclature data model is currently offered in SKOS, with the addition of elements from the Schema.org and Dublin Core models. The current model will soon be enhanced using SKOS-XL.    

CHIN plans to open a SPARQL endpoint and provide other open formats. Stay tuned for more details on these options.

Please contact Paul Bourcier at the AASLH Nomenclature Task Force or Heather Dunn at CHIN for more information.