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• Type A (Repositories, Research Institutes): These institutions can benefit from transforming their seed data (people, and/or publications) to an augmented graph of people, publications, grants, and datasets. Furthermore, these institutions will benefit from the smooth transformation of their augmented graph to a VIVO instance with no requirement of high technical expertise. 

• Type B (Semantic Web Sites): Government and research organisations such as GeoScience Australia who already have their research data in RDF format can use VIVO as a data exchange platform between Research Graph and their semantic web system. Furthermore, these sites will be able to take advantage of VIVO visualisations of their collaboration network -- the capability that is often missing from their local RDF-based research system. 

• Type C (Current VIVO Sites): Using the connection between VIVO and Research Graph, these sites can enrich their data and ingest new information into their systems.

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• Development of a process for producing a turn-key hosted VIVO based on Research Graph data, significantly reducing the effort of new implementers

• Production of linked data that could be used by the pilot organization for any purpose, including augmenting an existing VIVO, other research information, or data analysis systems

• Opportunity for analysis by network researchers at pilot organizations to study the outputs related to specific research areas/efforts

• Introducing Research Graph’s “second order” connections to the VIVO community. This provides not only the entities related to the seed data, but also entities related to the entities in the seed data. Second order data analysis can provide answers to questions such as “who do my collaborators collaborate with?” This is a tremendous advantage in the competitive landscape

• Potential to greatly improve the adoption of VIVO, and grow the VIVO community

• Development of technical automation to form the basis of services that can be provided to the VIVO community that supports the production of VIVO data and/or provides VIVO hosted software

An Expression of Interest (EOI) notice soliciting participation in a Research Graph VIVO Cloud Pilot  was distributed at the Open Repositories conference in June 2017 as well as at the eResearch conference on October 2017, both located in Australia. The notice was also distributed to peers in Germany and Canada.  Four organizations formally expressed interest in participation. Another five organizations informally expressed interest in participating..

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• A formal service definition

• Market analysis, including what we consider acceptable annual pricing. Anecdotally, we see evidence of demand for such a service, particularly among US and European research institutes with smaller staffs, and universities and institutes interested in VIVO concepts, but unwilling to master VIVO technologies (ontologies, triple stores, and linked data), and sites seeking outsourced services

• A go-to-market pitch describing the key value positions for go-to market

• Technical pipeline and deployment model for the production of  VIVO data and hosted VIVO sites. A deployment model under consideration is a full pipeline at Research Graph, including VIVO hosting.  Duraspace would handle promotion, sales, customer relations, and billing

• Cost model for one-time and annual pricing for small, medium, and large size seed data sets. This includes analysis of the resulting graph size from various seed data sets

• Staffing model, describing the roles which would be required to set up, operate, and support the service, and the division of labor between Research Graph and DuraSpace

• A recommendation regarding go-to market decision

Pilot Assumptions and Risks

• Market analysis -- We assume that there is a market for the production of VIVO data and turn-key hosted VIVO sites at a reasonable price.  However, the market analysis may indicate there is no market for the service
• Technical effort -- Duraspace is currently gapped with respect to VIVO technical knowledge due to staff turnover.  We assume this gap can be quickly filled by existing Duraspace staff, assisted by Dr. Conlon
• Customization -- we assume that the customer can be satisfied with simple theming (colors, logo, site name) of the turn-key hosted site, and that the theming can be delivered at reasonable cost
• Graph size -- the number of entities and triples -- resulting from particular seed datasets is not well understood.  Based on the experience of large VIVO sites (Duke, Vidwan, Florida), we do not expect this to be an issue, even for large seed datasets (10,000 researchers). We propose a limit on the size of the final graph to be 500,000 entities for the purposes of this Cloud Pilot
• Data value -- the data produced by Research Graph must be of high value to the customer, including significant coverage and accuracy of first and second order entities
• Team member commitment -- we assume that the Pilot Team members (see below) and pilot organizations can provide the required effort in the required timeframe to participate in a Cloud Pilot Working Group

Proposed Pilot Timeline and Effort

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