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VIVO Books From time to time, I'll pass along books I have found to be useful in thinking about VIVO and learning more about its information underpinnings. If you work with VIVO and want to understand more about its information system and its representation of scholarship as linked open data, you won't do better than "The Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist" by Jim Hendler (two-time VIVO conference keynote speaker) and Dean Allemang, whose consulting company is called "Working Ontologist". Jim and Dean clearly describe the semantic web, linked data, and ontology. For anyone with a background in data representation, and particularly for anyone who has wondered if relational tables are the only way, this book shows how connected graphs of data work, why they are important, and how, through ontology, they provide the best mechanisms yet found for sharing data. Unlike other information representation systems, linked data includes its semantics, allowing deep processing by machines, and simplified processing and sharing for humans and machines. If the semantic web or ontology seems complex, this book will help. And once you've read it, you may find it difficult to understand how other information representation systems scale. Extremely well-written and entertaining, with extensive examples and clear thinking, its hard to imagine a better introduction to the way the semantic web represents information. I can't recommend this book highly enough. Should be required reading for all of us creating open data for scholarship, and all of us working on VIVO.
Allemang, Dean, and Hendler, James Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist, Second Edition: Effective Modeling in RDFS and OWL 2nd Edition, Morgan-Kaufmann, 384 pages. ISBN 978-0123859655
Go VIVO!
Mike
Mike Conlon
VIVO Project Director