Membership in the VIVO Project. Is your institution a member of Duraspace, providing financial support to VIVO? You can find a list of financial supporters of VIVO here. Is your institution not on the list? It's easy to become a member. Membership starts at just $2500. Your institution can easily become a member. Just follow this link to support VIVO. Membership dollars support staff coordinating efforts of the project, including the efforts leading to improved software and documentation. Your support enables travel and presentations by VIVO to the world community of scholarship and participation by VIVO in efforts to improve the scholarly ecosystem. The VIVO project depends on its members to move the project forward. If your institution is already a member, we thank you and greatly value your support. If your institution is not a member, please consider starting a conversation within your institution regarding becoming a member.
SPARQL endpoint. One of the great advantages of VIVO is its ability to share data through the use of a SPARQL endpoint. You can establish a SPARQL endpoint to accompany your VIVO, supporting the sharing of data to people visiting your endpoint to run SPARQL queries. For an example of such an endpoint, see http://sparql.vivo.ufl.edu at the University of Florida. The UF SPARQL end point uses Fuseki, an Apache Project tool for serving RDF via the web. UF has a database synchronization between Fuseki and its VIVO, ensuring the VIVO data is always up to date as served by Fuseki. There was a good discussion and review of Fuseki and its use with VIVO on the tech list this week. You can follow the thread here. For documentation on using Fuseki with VIVO, see Fuseki in the VIVO wiki.
Ontology organization. Muhammad Javed is investigating the organization of the ontology files used by VIVO. As you may know, VIVO uses a variety of ontologies — foaf, skos, dcterms, bibo, and, of course VIVO-ISF – to represent scholarly activity. Understanding the dependencies of VIVO on the versions of these ontologies is critical to maintaining and advancing VIVO. The VIVO-ISF ontology has many domains – grants, people, papers and more. Having these as modules will improve understanding, flexibility, and maintenance. See https://github.com/mjaved495/VIVO_Ontology_Parser for preliminary work.
Conferences in the new year. We hope to present VIVO at a number of events in the coming year. The spring CNI meeting in Austin, the Force11 meeting in Portland, Open Repositories in Dublin, and the EuroCRIS meeting in St. Andrews are likely, as well as the VIVO Conference in Denver. Are there other events VIVO should plan to attend? We are considering have one or more "VIVO Days" in conjunction with conferences to introduce VIVO to potential new adopters, answer questions, discuss strategy and direction and meet with members of the VIVO community. If you have ideas about conferences and events for the coming year, please send me a note and consider sharing your ideas at upcoming calls of the Outreach and Engagement Interest Group.
Go VIVO!
Mike
Mike Conlon
VIVO Project Director
