External Metadata

One of the main models of Image are Person, Keyword and Location. To avoid manual administrative effort, metadata is added automatically from the GND Database (aka. the Integrated Authority File of the German National Library), the Art & Architecture Thesaurus of the Getty Research Institute or Wikidata, if a valid external source ID is provided.

Affected fields

The following fields of the Person model are automatically filled in from the GND Database:

  • name

  • synonyms

  • date_birth

  • date_death

The following fields of the Location model are automatically filled in from the GND Database & Wikidata:

  • name

  • name_en (extracted from Wikidata if a valid Wikidata ID is provided via GND)

  • synonyms

The following fields of the Keyword model are automatically filled in from the Getty Database:

  • name_en

All responses from external APIs are saved in the external_metadata field belonging to the respective model.

Overwrite mechanism

Depending on the used overwrite flag by the model, their respective fields are updated automatically. Both the fields of Location and Person are updated depending on the status of gnd_overwrite. Keyword’s fields are updated according to the status of the getty_overwrite flag.

  • If gnd_overwrite flag is turned on:

    • The system automatically updates relevant fields with metadata from the GND Database.

    • Any existing values in these fields will be replaced with the imported GND metadata.

    • This is the default state for entries.

  • If gnd_overwrite flag is turned off:

    • The system preserves the existing data and prevents updates from the GND import process. But it stores the full API response in the external_metadata field.

The getty_overwrite flag functions similarly to gnd_overwrite:

  • Only the name_en field is updated, if available, allowing for the inclusion of translated keywords from the Getty Vocabulary Database.