October 16, 2015, 1 PM EST

Attendees

Steering Group Members

Paul Albert , Jon Corson-Rikert , Dean B. Krafft, Robert H. McDonald, Andi Ogier, Bart Ragon, Julia Trimmer, Alex Viggio

= note taker

Ex officio

 debra hanken kurtz, Graham Triggs, Mike Conlon, Jonathan Markow

Regrets

Melissa Haendel, Kristi Holmes, Eric Meeks

Dial-In Number:  

DIAL-IN: 641-715-3650, Participant code: 117433#

Agenda

Notes

1. Updates
   1. Grid data released by Digital Science.  See https://www.grid.ac/  Over 40,000 organizations with unique identifiers.  CC-BY license.
   2. 1.8.1 nearing completion.  See https://goo.gl/AmW8IQ
   3. Nature article.  ORCID as a profile system.  http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/science/articles/10.1038/nj7572-281a
   4. Suggestion to change the name of the VIVO-ISF organization.  https://goo.gl/r16gGq
   5. Wiki maintenance:  Community Projects pages – catalog and descriptions of software that works with VIVO.  archiving legacy pages in technical documentation.  Improvements to pages regarding system administration.
   6. SHARE VIVO harvester substantially complete – provides VIVO data to SHARE and SHARE search.  See https://goo.gl/kKwA7C.  Work beginning to import data from SHARE to VIVO.
2. Revise agenda
3. 1.81. release update
   1. Graham has made significant progress on performance in two areas – in the rendering of individual profile pages and the Map of Science visualizations
   2. He anticipates that the Map of Science will be fast enough given these improvements to leave turned on by default in the 1.8.1 release
   3. Some testing is being done out in the community, which is very helpful
4. GRID release
   1. Digital Science has released the GRID dataset of organization names with about 45,000 entries that looks to be a very promising start
   2. The VIVO community will need to consider how to use this, and what path would best allow VIVO sites to use and augment the dataset
5. ORCID as a profile system
   1. Is seen as a profile system despite ORCID public statements
   2. Has had profile elements all along
   3. A central system you can opt into, like others of its type, but simpler data model and has no social functions
   4. The profile strategy in Portugal, where researchers have been required to establish ORCID iDs, is to use ORCID individually a and harvest information from ORCID to a VIVO at the national level
   5. Simeon Warner from the ORCID Board is positioning ORCID as a resource for individual researchers to help in disambiguation, rather than as a profile system
   6. We should develop talking points around this – we believe everyone should have an ORCID, and there is a simple profile there that can help with disambiguation and point to a better profile, most likely at the institution where they work
      1. An important, developing part of the research infrastructure
      2. Part of the VIVO integration with ORCID was to put the VIVO URI (with permission) into the person's ORCID record
   7. Recommend that we figure out what our response should be and to have a public response along the lines above, explaining how the two can partner and complement each other
      1. e.g., you can use ORCID to feed your VIVO
      2. And we don't want our people to be discouraged by the idea that everybody will use ORCID as their only profile
      3. And ORCID makes no claims that this is a universal, comprehensive profile system – primarily an identifier system where people can include as much of their profile information as they wish
      4. If the entire country of Portugal will be feeding VIVO from ORCID profiles, can we generalize on that? They note that there's not all that much data in ORCID but everyone has one
      5. Two strong things
         1. Everyone should have an ORCID iD
         2. Every researcher should go to ORCID and disambiguate their publications, claiming the ones that are yours and rejecting those that are not
      6. It means that we're more likely to get more of your pubs correct in any kind of ecosystem handoffs
      7. A place where the world can help clean up its data
   8. ORCID is not a threat to VIVO, despite the perception that it's a profile system – we should promote it positively
   9. I would love our university give everyone an ORCID iD, but won't tell our faculty to go curate there because will also be asking them to curate at UVa – will just irritate them – and we need to capture the accurate information at the university level
      1. What they need out of it is an ORCID iD, but curating their publications may be hard – asking them to do anything, and especially not to do it twice
   10. Virginia Tech is working on rolling out ORCID through Elements instead of doing the batch create – advertise ORCID when roll out Elements, as faculty go in to Elements encourage them to get an ORCID iD and then push to VIVO
       1. Data gets pulled to Elements if a DOI, but ORCID gets some data from sources that Elements doesn't have
       2. Can the data be pushed back to ORCID? It's technically possible but institutionally challenging
       3. Perhaps VIVO could promote a demonstrated workflow for adding ORCID iDs from VIVO and/or Elements
   11. Need somebody to draft a statement – could get Simeon and others to look it over
       1. Would be useful to lay out the options for integrations
       2. ORCID advocates that users get their own iDs so don't get duplicates – it's not an ORCID until it's claimed, and it's the researcher's own identifier, not an institution's; they don't care about the profiles, and are expecting the driver to be publishers asking for the ORCID
       3. Mike will draft something short (press release length) and a separate document for implementers describing the various options and channels are
6. Changing the name of the VIVO-ISF organization
   1. A group of ontologists meeting weekly, five of whom involved in the VIVO project, but seeing the role of the ontology relating to other applications including eagle-i and SciENCV
   2. A Google doc proposing an organizational name that speaks to this larger context, clarifying that there's a group of people working together with a group of ontologies
   3. Would not change the name of the eagle-i ontology (ERO) or VIVO-ISF ontology
   4. The VIVO community should be aware and may comment
   5. A Venn diagram problem – a number of ontologies, some of which relate to VIVO and some to other applications and ontologies used for other purposes
   6. Part of the goal is to provide better modularity, so that these multiple ontologies can work together
   7. Some risks in name change; and one risk for VIVO is that there's already a perception that an ontology was created that caused great disruption in the community because it wasn't responsive to the issues the community would face in trying to upgrade the software and data to use the new ontology
      1. If we have a group that is now independent and serving a number of projects, that will reinforce the concern that this new group may proceed without the needs of the VIVO community in mind
      2. We need to assure the VIVO community that it will have sufficient voice in what happens to the ontology – both perception and reality
   8. Comments provide an outline of a process addressing the practical considerations of having a piece of software that evolves but is using an ontology that also evolves
      1. Need to develop a practical process by which we use the ontology and a governance process for that
      2. And the software can't necessarily wait for the ontology (or vice versa)
   9. Would be good to have a lightweight document to lay out the understandings
      1. If someone did want to contribute to the VIVO ontology community, would they join this group or another one?
      2. The expectation of the ontology group is to have an open project working via GitHub; we would urge VIVO people to participate in
         
         1. But to get from the ontologists' work to the software is the responsibility (and the decision) of the VIVO community – we will decide whether those features will make it into the VIVO software – we can't have an independent group deciding the ontology for the VIVO application
         2. And if we have to cherry pick from the ontology, it gets very complicated
7. In-kind Contributions and Recognition
   1. next time
8. Future topics

Action Items

• Mike Conlon will draft a statement regarding ORCID and VIVO