Create Launch Strategy

Identify Power Users

Data contributors or other stakeholders may be able to help identify those users who are likely to be active participants and who edit and update their profiles regularly. These might be people who have easily adopted other systems in the recent past. The Site Admin==>User Accounts link can be sorted by the number of logins, which might also help identify power users.

Develop Training Materials

See examples of training materials at Duke University's Scholars@Duke

Prepare Data Loads

Depending on how your technical roles are defined, this task will be shared between your data staff/domain experts and your developers.  This is when ontology mapping goes from conceptual diagrams to actual RDF generation.  Preparation of the data loads involves:

• executing the data cleanup strategy
• physically mapping the data to the ontology
• verifying the RDF generated.

See XSLT Ingest Example and Using a different data store

Document Data Provenance

Maintenance of the data in your VIVO instance requires thorough documentation of your data flow.  Some of this information may be documented internally, while some of it will make sense to load in VIVO as part of the metadata. See Provenance Ontology.

Build Customized System

Add your customizations to VIVO. If you are only making small changes, mostly to appearance, you might add your changes directly to the VIVO distribution files. For larger customizations, you should learn Building VIVO in 3 tiers. This helps to organize your installation, and will make it easier to implement system upgrades when the time comes.

Test Performance

Before announcing your VIVO system to the public, you should test to be sure that it performs acceptably. If not, you might consider Use HTTP caching to improve performance, or the methods in Troubleshooting VIVO's Performance. <This needs work.>

Oversee Publicity Campaign

Communication is an important part of the launch strategy.  It's important to let the community know that VIVO's coming. Different audiences may need different messages, and different ways to engage with the project. See <Communication Strategies> for more information.

Implement Assessment Plan

How will you know when your VIVO implementation is successful? Consider a set of goals or a mission statement, endorsed by the VIVO governance groups. These goals should be tied to your assessment plan. See <Assessing the Impact of VIVO at Your Institution> to learn more about how to demonstrate the value of your VIVO.

Publicize VIVO

In addition to regular meetings with primary stakeholders, materials can be posted or mailed to those with potential interest. An example of a poster for that purpose is here.

Hold Trainings

Route Data Cleanup Requests

From the cleanup strategy identified for the initial ingest, you will need to determine which are ongoing tasks and what the frequency will be going forward.  Once your VIVO instance is established, you will want to work with management and to identify the resources and workflow by which data maintenance requests will be addressed.  See Data Maintenance. You may have noticed inconsistencies or missing data during your initial ingest that could not be addressed in batch.  It is good to be aware of potential cleanup requests and have an established method for correcting the data.  See Monitoring for quality.

Support Data Provisioning

One of the fun parts of getting your data into VIVO is finding out all of the creative ways it can be reused in other systems.  See Finding VIVO Data with the University of Florida Public SPARQL Endpoint. Setting up a SPARQL endpoint is one way to write customized queries for data consumers.  See Setting up a VIVO SPARQL Endpoint. SPARQL query results can be run periodically and exported in several common formats such as .csv and .xml.  For example queries see Rich export SPARQL queries. Web developers may find the VIVO widgets to be a useful way to consume VIVO data as JSON.

Provide System Support

As with any IT project, you should expect VIVO to require ongoing support. This includes things like backups, security checks, upgrades to operating systems, etc.

Contribute to VIVO community

Once the dust settles, you'll want to share your experiences and best practices with the VIVO community. Follow other VIVO sites on social media, and create your own accounts to share your news. Join a VIVO task force to create or improve something. We need your help to make the VIVO community stronger!

Find New Collaborators

Engaging a research organization's community will depend on identifying new collaborators who might either contribute to or use the VIVO (or both). 

Hold User Meetings

Manage Ontology Updates

Ontologies can be updated to add or remove terms as a domain becomes better defined.  Ontology changes can be initialized from within your institution (ex. an identifier specific to your institution) or externally (ex. a deprecated term identified by an international standards organization).  The ontology change can be adopted at the level of the the VIVO ontology, or it can be a change done locally within your institution, aka a “local extension”.  For an example, see Ontology Extensions -- Duke.  Local extensions can easily become duplicate ways of defining the same type of information, so it can be helpful to collaborate with the VIVO ontology community when deciding whether or not you need to create a local extension. To the extent that it is relevant to the broader VIVO community, it is important that over time, local ontology extensions get incorporated into the VIVO core ontology.  See Proposed ontology development workflow.

Add New Data & Sources

Data curation is an ongoing task and including new data types or new data sources will most likely be an aspect of maintaining your VIVO instance.  You may find that your initial implementation draws more interest from owners of data repositories you hadn’t considered.  You may want to prioritize new data sources based on the data quality and volume, as well as the number of new ontology mappings required.  As an example, see Activating the ORCID integration.

Implement System Upgrades

The VIVO team issues a new release about every year, with occasional extra releases to fix problems. For the most part, upgrading is straightforward. If there is a change in the VIVO ontology, the new release will include an automatic script to translate your existing data. Again, it is not unusual to find that the largest task is making changes in your data ingest processes. Most VIVO sites try to adopt new releases as soon as possible, to take advantage of new features or improved performance.

Develop New Features

You should also plan to develop new customizations for your VIVO installation. As your users gain experience, they will likely request new data and new displays. In the best case, these changes may be something that you can contribute to the VIVO community, so others may benefit from your work.