Harpring presents the Getty Vocabularies as curated knowledge bases rather than simple lists of approved terms. Their iconic function is to connect names, concepts, people, places, objects and cultural contexts across art-historical collections while accommodating multilingual variants, contested information and complex relationships. The theoretical contribution lies in showing that vocabulary control can coexist with ambiguity and historical plurality. Methodologically, the system combines expert curation, community contribution, international standards and Linked Open Data publication through persistent identifiers and semantic links. The conceptual operation is authoritative disambiguation without semantic closure: terms become interoperable while retaining sources, variants and contextual distinctions. The wider bridge reaches art history, museum informatics, knowledge organisation and decolonial cataloguing. The Getty model reveals that a vocabulary is an active cultural infrastructure whose inclusions, preferred labels and relational structures shape what can be discovered and how cultural difference becomes machine-readable.
