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Documentation specific to VIVO-ISF lives on this wiki and will continue to evolve as the VIVO-ISF Ontology Working Group, led by Melissa Haendel and Brian Lowe, receives feedback from the rollout. Communities of interested are forming within the working group and will lead implementation of corrections, improvements, and expansion of the VIVO-ISF ontology for future releases. Please join the biweekly ontology working group calls.
To understand the VIVO-ISF changes from previous releases, we call particular attention to the VIVO 1.5 to VIVO-ISF change diagrams. Upgrading VIVO from version 1.5.x to version 1.6 includes an automated data migration process that should convert all existing VIVO content to the new ontology structure, but any local data ingest processes processes will almost certainly need to be modified to generate data compatible with the new ontology. We recommend backing up the VIVO 1.5 database and performing a provisional upgrade on a test server to confirm that the upgrade will complete smoothly – please see the VIVO 1.6 upgrade documentation for more details.
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VIVO has gained significant adoption outside North America and internationalization of the application menus and other interface elements and ontology labels has emerged as a high priority, sometimes even in other English-speaking countries where even minor terminology changes tweaks have previously until now required modifying the VIVO application. VIVO now v1.6 leverages Java resource bundles to separate all text strings embedded in menus, page templates, dialog boxes, error messages, and ontology class and property labels from the application itself so that translations can be accomplished without programming. Separating language-specific text from the code also minimizes the work of updating alternate language versions of VIVO for future releases; a comparison of the changes in the English text from one version to the next can pinpoint areas where text in another language would also need modification.
We characterize the internationalization in version 1.6 as read-only because significant additional work will be required to make interactive editing of all VIVO content in multiple languages possible. Content in the form of RDF bearing standard language tags and imported into VIVO will be displayed appropriately; VIVO will respect a user's current browser-based language preference settings to find the closest match based on BCP 47 standard language tags – for details see the W3C document on setting language preferences in a browser.
VIVO v1.6 does support editing each individual entity's primary label to supplement the default language with additional labels in other languages. While limited to labels, this would allow showing multiple versions of a person's or organization's name as well as including titles of books or other publications in multiple languages. Users whose browser settings indicate a language preference will see the appropriate language by default, with an icon to indicate that additional languages are available for that individual entity.
VIVO v1.6 still ships with U.S. English as the default language; we have prepared using Google Translate a set of files for testing only of a Spanish version of VIVO, and we expect an announcement soon of an official version prepared by VIVO community members.
to be continued ...