Table of Contents

Linking via concept services

Many people have requested support for associating terms from established controlled vocabularies with people, publications, grants, organizations, and other types of data in VIVO. While small taxonomies or vocabularies may most easily be imported in their entirety into VIVO, a number of the more popular controlled vocabularies are very large in proportion to the number of terms likely to be referenced within a single VIVO instance. Incorporating terms by reference helps keep terms in sync as these vocabularies continue to evolve and is more consistent with linked data principles.

Stony Brook University's Department of Medical Bioinformatics, led by Dr. Moisés Eisenberg, hosts an RDF version of the National Library of Medicine's Unified Medical Language System or UMLS (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/). Through a 2011 VIVO mini-grant, Stony Brook has developed a web service that accepts incoming term requests from VIVO and returns one or more matching UMLS concepts with stable URIs. VIVO displays the label associated with the UMLS concept but the concept's URI ensures that references remain unambiguous, even across multiple VIVO instances at different institutions.

Overview

VIVO provides the ability to use external vocabularies to represent the research areas of scholars, and the concepts pertaining to scholarly works.  External vocabularies that provide RDF can be used with VIVO.  Using an external service, a curator, or page owner may query the external vocabulary for terms, and select terms representing the work or scholar.  The terms are fetched from the external service and added to the VIVO triple store.  Links from the work or person and added to connect the person or work to the selected term or terms.

See below

Image AddedThe interface from VIVO to the UMLS service has been implemented to allow linking to additional vocabulary services such as GEMET (http://www.eionet.europa.eu/gemet), and we will offer additional choices in upcoming releases.

VIVO RDF statements referencing external concepts

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Adding a new external vocabulary service to VIVO