• Created by Unknown User (holmeskr), last modified on May 30, 2011

Is VIVO like other software?

There are many other systems that appear to be “like” VIVO on the surface. Many systems provide support for “research networking,” “Facebook for researchers” or other terms that would appear to be similar to VIVO. Let’s break this down a bit.

There are a large group of systems that are centralized “Facebook for Scientist” type systems. Similar to LinkedIn, these systems are single commercially sponsored systems that scientists can use (sign up). Some pre-load profiles of funding, publications and contact information from web-page sources. Examples include Mendeley, ResearchGate, I Am Scientist, BiomedExperts, and many more. These systems are not very much like VIVO. They are centrally managed, not distributed. They do not use or promote open source or open processes. They do not have an open ontology and they provide little to no data via the semantic web.

A class of software often discussed with VIVO are faculty activity or reporting systems. Many schools have such systems for maintain information about the faculty. The systems are optimized for reporting and particularly reporting faculty productivity in the context of tenure and promotion. Activity Insight, Symplectic Elements and many other locally developed systems serve the needs of universities to have accurate information of the work of the faculty. Such systems may not collect information for research discovery or support of collaboration – on-going studies and projects, research resources, datasets, unpublished works, events and other items which are quite natural in VIVO. Activity and reporting systems are not designed for giving data away, nor for supporting cross-site search or consumption of data by applications. VIVO is not in conflict with such systems – the systems serve different purposes. Activity systems serve the needs of university administration. VIVO serves the needs of research and scholarship.

Yet another class of systems are locally owned and operated, and often locally developed faculty directories. Some of these systems are open source while others are commercial products. Examples include Stanford CAP, Elsevier SciVal Experts, Iowa’s Loki, Northwestern’s Lattice Grid, Harvard Profiles and Pittsburgh’s Digital Vita. Like VIVO, they are locally managed and can provide authoritative data regarding faculty rank, department, courses taught, links to institutional repositories. Many such systems are quite limited, providing only contact information, while others collect contact and publication data. Unlike VIVO, they are hard-coded to collect and provide particular data. VIVO uses an open ontology which can easily be extended to collect and provide additional data beyond that provided by the base software and ontology. Harvard Profiles is moving in the direction of the VIVO ontology and provides some data in RDF format. It does not have the open architecture of VIVO, permitting local extension. It is important to emphasize the open nature of VIVO, its extensible ontology and its fundamental capability to provide its data in a simple, open manner via the semantic web.

Over the course of the past two years we encountered many dozens of systems related to faculty and their work. VIVO is a system built for the semantic web, open in its software, ontology and processes, and capable of providing and linking its data across sites in support of research and scholarship discovery. We find that VIVO is not much like these other systems. It provides an open foundation for next generation research discovery.

VIVO at the MLA

A number of VIVO team members recently attended and presented at the recent Medical Libraries Association (MLA) meetings in Minneapolis: Kristi Holmes's conference report is below:

The NIH VIVO implementation was discussed during a presentation by James King in the NIH Libraries and it was discussed with a lot of enthusiasm along with these phrases: "exciting","where things are heading", "the best way to tie various things together" (such as federal data), and and my favorite: "VIVO is the key".

We gave a number of presentations where VIVO was either mentioned or served as the main topic:

  • Hannah Norton from the University of Florida participated in the Ignite session. Hannah's talk was titled: "VIVO: Click... search... discover... collaborate!"
  • Hannah also presented a poster from the VIVO team during the poster session titled, "The Role of a National Conference in Engendering Support and Adoption: VIVO 2010" and the authors are: Hannah F. Norton, Michele R. Tennant, Kristi L. Holmes, Katy Borner, Jennifer R.S. Coffey, Alicia Turner, Nita Ferree, Kaitlin Blackburn, Mike Conlon, and VIVO Collaboration.
  • I spoke about VIVO during my two talks in the “From Bench to Bedside: Librarians’ Roles in Translational Medicine” session:
    • Clinical and Translational Science Awards Renewal Activities: A Vital Role for Libraries (Kristi L. Holmes and Cathy C. Sarli, AHIP)
    • Rethinking Our Roles: Genomics and Translational Medicine for Information Professionals (Ana D. Cleveland, AHIP, Kristi L. Holmes, and Jodi L. Philbrick) – this presentation is about the course I teach at UNT. Another example of VIVO in course materials!
  • And Jennifer Lyon, Michele Tennant and I all touched upon our outreach roles/researcher networking in our individual presentations that were part of a keynote panel for AAAS, “Library-based Support for Translational Science.” Because of our individual topics, Jen and I were able to discuss our roles with VIVO in more detail. Michele gave the big-picture/set the stage presentation.

VIVO at AgNIC

Valrie Davis recently presented at AgNIC. Her conference report is below.

Last week I attended the AgNIC (Agricultural Network and Information Center) Annual Conference, and the United States Agricultural Information Network (USAIN) Board Meeting, both the primary conferences for land-grant (Agricultural Science) librarians. It was a really fabulous meeting with a lot of interest in VIVO, so I thought I’d share.

I had a chance to meet with Federico Sancho (Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture – or IICA) and hear about his institution’s VIVO implementation progress. He’s a strong advocate within the Latin American community and has forged strong ties with University of Mexico and Ponce School of Medicine. They are in discussions about a Spanish language version of VIVO and he is hoping to talk Canada’s version of the USDA into starting its own implementation (department of Agriculture and Agri-Food).

I also met Lea Delos Reyes in the Philippines, from the International Rice Research Institute, (her name and business card elude me!) who is hoping to go back and drum up local interest in beginning a VIVO implementation. Definitely exciting to see the international interest.

The land-grant community is also excited. So excited, in fact, that the AgNIC Alliance discussed the creation of a VIVO Taskforce with the goals of utilizing VIVO to:

  1. Promote VIVO at the institutions to help collaboration
  2. Facilitate development of more collaborative subject portals like the animal health portal
  3. Provide partner assistance to AgNIC solo librarians

They have a lot of questions about unique identifiers, linkages between systems, appropriate public data sources, etc. Should be interesting to see how the taskforce progresses.
The taskforce will be composed of representatives from:

  • Michigan State U
  • New Mexico State U
  • Univ of Hawaii at Manoa
  • Univ of Vermont
  • Ohio State U
  • U of Maryland
  • International Rice Research Institute
  • Rutgers
  • Cornell (Nan Hyland)
  • Univ of Tennessee
  • CYFERnet
  • NAL
  • Washington State U

You can find Val’s presentation here: http://vivo.ufl.edu/display/n80452

Implementation Fest, St. Louis, June 23-24

The implementation Fest invitations have gone out, responses are coming in. A curriculum is being developed for two full days of workshops with parallel tracks. Policy and Project management will cover the development of project plans, scoping projects, building teams, garnering support, acquiring data, managing implementations and transition to operations. The technical track will include VIVO system administration, branding, authentication, Harvester and XSLT.

We have an opportunity to help many groups with their implementations and develop solid implementation materials as a result. If you have ideas regarding the content, please contact Valrie Davis (vdavis@ufl.edu) who is working with the team leads and presenters to further develop the curriculum and materials.

Conference submission deadline is June 1

Have you submitted an abstract for a presentation of poster at the VIVO conference? The deadline for submissions is this Wednesday, June 1. See http://vivoweb.org/files/CFP.pdf for instructions, and https://www.easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?conf=vivo2011 to submit.

Promoting the VIVO Conference on listservs

Have you had the chance to send a note to your professional listservs regarding the upcoming VIVO conference? This is one of the most effective means we have for getting the word out about the conference. A plain text version of an email you can send appeared in VIVO Notes 20. Please cut and paste to your professional listserv if you have not already done so. Please send a note to Alicia Turner (aliciatu@ufl.edu) when you have sent a note.

Ideas for VIVO Notes?

Is there an idea that you would like to see developed in VIVO Notes? Do you have questions or concerns that might best be presented here? Please drop me a note.

Mike Conlon 00:55, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

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