Arches Lingo

An Arches application for creating, managing, and sharing authority data.

Arches Lingo provides comprehensive support for the development and dissemination of reference data. The application was designed for the collaborative development of controlled vocabularies and to facilitate the dissemination of reference data by creating a central hub for a community of users.

Developed by the Getty Conservation Institute with input from knowledge organization specialists at Historic England and other organizations, Arches Lingo is intended to manage authority data and when positioned as a canonical source, can be shared widely as a trusted resource and integrate with other systems that leverage terminology data.

Why Arches Lingo?

Because Arches was designed to handle the complexity of cultural heritage data, it provides a robust foundation for an application that handles the complexity of hierarchical cultural heritage vocabulary management.

Prior to the development of Lingo, the first steps in deploying an Arches application demanded a certain amount of expertise in knowledge organization by requiring the creation and design of thesauri and the subsequent mapping of concepts to editing forms. Arches Lingo decouples the work of creating and managing controlled vocabularies from that of using them, making Arches itself more accessible to users who have expertise in their domain but not in data organization.

Lingo users will be able to either use the application as a purpose-built tool for designing and building authority data or subscribe to a Lingo service that provides the vocabularies they need. Though powered by Arches and easily integrated with other Arches-based systems, Lingo’s support for multiple export formats, including csv, SKOS, JSON-LD, allow integration with non-Arches platforms.

What does Lingo do?

Developed with the needs of the terminology specialist in mind, Arches Lingo was designed to accommodate the existing workflows of these users. It provides new, robust tools to accomplish many tasks more effectively than previously achievable in Arches alone.

• Schemes and Concepts Creator and Editor. UI to create schemes and concepts based on the requirements of terminology specialists, including terminology hierarchies.
• Robust Context, Including Images. Concept fields support the upload of images for additional context and to enhance educational value.
• Hierarchical Browse.  Clearly visualized hierarchies of the full scheme structure provide additional navigational tools including expand/collapse, filter capabilities, and the ability to jump directly to any concept.
• Bulk Concept Import/Export. Concepts can be imported and exported in multiple formats, including SKOS and JSON-LD.
• Full Text and Concept search support.
• Advanced Search with faceted filtering capabilities.
• Saved Search and saved search results, for managing lists of terms.
• URI Minting. URIs ensure the unambiguous identification of a concept or scheme, and support matching with concepts that are managed in external systems.
• Lifecycle States. By default, new instances of a scheme or concept will be in a “draft” state, which represents the initial state in an instance lifecycle.
• Dashboard and User Profiles are among the features that enhance usability.
• Internationalization. A language selector makes it possible to use the interface in multiple languages and to manage multilingual vocabulary data.

Arches Controlled Lists

The Arches Controlled Lists extension is available in Arches as of version 8, providing useful vocabulary management capabilities to users who don’t necessarily require the wholesale vocabulary building offered by Lingo. More robust than the legacy Reference Data Manager, Arches Controlled Lists provides a set of tools for managing controlled lists within the Arches framework for use as dropdowns in forms and other UI components. It provides a UI for creating, editing, and managing controlled lists and their items, including:

• Concept hierarchies
• Alternate labels
• Localization
• Notes
• List item URIs
• Images
• Easily editable term hierarchies

Arches Controlled Lists is a key component in enabling the use of Arches Lingo data across projects. It allows vocabularies to be loaded from Arches Lingo data or any other data authority capable of providing SKOS RDF formatted data.

Roadmap

There are several features on the roadmap for Lingo that are not yet assigned to a release.  Future plans include:

• Splitting and Merging of Concepts. Workflows for complex processes, like the splitting and merging of concepts.
• Collaborative Workflows, allowing multiple editors from multiple organizations to contribute to the same vocabularies, creating universal vocabularies with community-level ownership.
• SPARQL endpoint for querying thesauri and their terms
• Ability to manage hierarchies for People and Groups, Places, and Time Periods

Header Image: Getty Conservation Institute. Representation of “controlled vocabularies” hierarchy from the Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus.

Updated: April 2026