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VIVO is not just people profiles or the usual static mix of department and faculty web pages. If you try a search for 'ontology' you'll see results about people, events, organizations, installations, and research. Each distinct type of entity represented in VIVO has its own attributes and relationships to others of itself or of other types, sometimes directly or sometimes through intermediate connections indicating roles or a time frame for the relationship. VIVO has to be able to change as people take on new projects, are promoted, or move to a different department or institution.
A publication in VIVO is modeled not as one entity but as several – the article or book itself, a journal or publisher, each author, and additional objects representing the date of publication, editors or translators, and author order. Publications modeled individually rather than just embedded as text citations on a person's web page can be linked to each co-author and assembled into reports by journal, topic, academic department, research grant or facility, or time period.
Making connections explicit.
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Because VIVO models data in a very granular way, it can be combined and reused more easily than web pages composed only of unstructured text and HTML markup. Try browsing a VIVO page in a linked data browser such as LinkSailor, where the structure underlying the HTML display of the same data in VIVO can be clearly seen.
What does this mean? VIVO data is accessible, discoverable, reusable, and portable – all important factors given the work involved in gathering and maintaining accurate and complete information about researchers and what they do.
For more information
A publication in VIVO is modeled not as one entity but as several – the article or book itself, a journal or publisher, each author, and additional objects representing the date of publication, editors or translators, and author order. Publications modeled individually rather than just embedded as text citations on a person's web page can be linked to each co-author and assembled into reports by journal, topic, academic department, research grant or facility, or time period.
Semantic data.
VIVO is an example of an application built entirely with Semantic Web technologies promoted by the World Wide Web Consortium.
VIVO stores data as RDF expressed in terms of vocabularies called ontologies, and provides persistent URIs for data to allow information to be reliably and directly linked, as described further in part 5: VIVO as data.
For more information
VIVO has a Semantic Web primer and a list of Semantic Web resourcesRead about Linked Open Data
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on to part 3 of the tour: starting a VIVO project
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