Michael Becich, Titus Schleyer, Linda Schmandt, William Shirey, John Milnes, Michele Morris, Johnson Paul, Shiyi Sehn, University of Pittsburgh
Project Announcement
Background
Research networking systems (RNS), such as VIVO and Digital Vita (DV), provide an important source of information about researchers’ publications, grants and other accomplishments. Their primary purpose is to facilitate the discovery of researcher interests and the establishment of high-impact, productive collaborations. While these functions are important, they are not sufficient to fully incentivize adoption of RNSs among their target audiences. Importantly, RNSs must provide other direct and tangible benefits to be fully adopted. Among these benefits is the ability for researchers to generate various documents relevant to their work, such as a Curriculum Vitae (CV), NIH biosketches, evaluation forms and online profile pages from their RNS profile data. Digital Vita (DV), the University of Pittsburgh’s RNS for biomedical researchers, has, since its inception, allowed faculty to maintain their full CV data, and to generate NIH biosketches and the University of Pittsburgh-specific health sciences CV.
The focus of this proposal is to port Digital Vita’s document generation functions to the VIVO platform, generalize them, and to provide a simple Web application for VIVO users to manage and generate NIH biosketches. Subsequent to the project period, this Web application could be implemented as part of the VIVO application.
Goals of DV Docs
The development of DV Docs described in this proposal has three goals: (1) develop a method to output personal profile data stored in VIVO as structured, well-formatted documents in rtf or pdf format; (2) provide a generalized, template-based approach for developers to modify the format and/or content of generated documents in order to allow them to create new documents based on the VIVO data model; and (3) provide a basic, standalone Web application to edit and generate full NIH biosketches based on functionality currently implemented in DV. The first two of these goals provide an important addition to the VIVO infrastructure by allowing VIVO developers to leverage document generation functions that we have implemented already in Digital Vita. Generalizing these functions through our second goal enables developers to create customized documents that are adapted to the local, regional or national context. The third goal offers end users the important capability to edit and output NIH biosketches based on their VIVO data. This application will be available to end users at the end of the project period, and we anticipate that its functionality will be integrated with the VIVO application code base subsequently.
GitHub
https://github.com/vivo-project/vivo-dvdocs
