Page History

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• This is the biggest likely stumbling block when the immediate benefits of searching multiple distributed databases have been realized and users start to expect the logical next steps – being able to search for data in common across the different source institutions, and especially for connections linking researchers at one institution with colleagues at another
  
  • This broader and more ambitious goal is a compelling one for CTSAs (NIH Clinical and Translational Science Award sites) due to the explicit mandates from NIH and expectations from Congress that CTSAs will be able to show evidence of increased collaboration across as well as within CTSAs.
• The fundamental challenge is that any person, funding or research organization, conference, publisher, or journal appearing in the data from more than one institution will have multiple different URIs, and the data will not likely carry enough information to support disambiguation without further analysis and processing.
  
  • The fact that data about a person at Harvard harvested from the UF VIVO will have a UF namespace is good for provenance and will help with disambiguation but may be confusing to users, especially when it's not obvious which URI is most authoritative, as with events, organizations, journals, or funding agencies.
• It remains to be seen what the most effective way to approach the disambiguation task will be – very likely this will depend on priorities, with the disambiguation of researchers at subscribing institutions likely the highest priority but also potentially the most difficult.
• Third party information such as ORCIDs, Scopus or Researcher Id records, and VIAF will be very relevant but not uniformly populated

Strategy?

• It will be important to look ahead to the disambiguation issues and anticipate what aspects of indexing for VIVO search could either help or hinder future disambiguation processes, but it's also important to move ahead with the search, not only to produce the immediate benefits that will provided, but to support further analysis based on real data rather than speculation.

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