VIVO Documentation
Old Release
This documentation relates to an old version of VIVO, version 1.13.x.
Looking for another version? See all documentation.
Overview
VIVO is an enterprise class software system relying on numerous open source software components. Fundamentally, VIVO relies on Vitro (see below). VIVO adds a collection of ontologies (see Ontology Reference) to represent data about scholarship.
Vitro
Vitro is an open source, general purpose, semantic web engine. It is the application development platform underlying VIVO. Vitro has no domain knowledge. Given ontologies regarding a domain, Vitro supports the editing of the ontology, creation of individuals, management of individuals on "pages" which it generates, organization of individuals into "class groups," indexing, search, faceted browsing, query, import, and export. Vitro has been used to manage collections of clinical trials, spaceships, library catalogs, datasets, and many more.
VIVO is Vitro with an ontology for representing scholarship, and a set of displays and visualizations that support the use of data for expert finding, team building, assessment, and other VIVO use cases.
Vitro can be built and operated independently of VIVO. VIVO is completely dependent on Vitro.
VIVO
VIVO is a customized Vitro. The table below shows how VIVO compares to Vitro.
VIVO General-purpose tool for working with Semantic Data Specialized tool for Research Networking No ontology Includes an ontology (VIVO-ISF) for Research Networking Minimal theme Elaborate theme, display and editing are customized for the ontology Annotations are used to: Default functionality Additional functionality: visualizations, interface to Harvester, QR codes, etc. Vitro Purpose Ontology Theme Display Rules Default display rules Form editing Default editing forms Editing is customized to the ontology Search Index Default search index Search index contains additional fields specific to VIVO Functionality
Component View
VIVO, with Vitro, as "made" out of components, including other open source software components. The figure below shows the various software components that are used in a VIVO/Vitro system.