...

• Easy and useful for users
• User loyalty high & strong resources
  
  • does exactly what people expect it to do on their first exploration – searches multiple institutions via a single search box, with no extraneous results from unexpected places; has useful facets by institution and type of data (people/organizations/etc)
• Continuous technology development
• Uniqueness, pioneer web application that overcomes many acknowledged limitations of federated approaches that can't rank relevance across multiple sources
• Targeted focus for expanding desired information
• Searches multiple institutions
• Open semantic web - all information not stored in one database, represents an "on ramp" to linked data world
• Provides local control over content, what is harvested, and how frequently
• Ability to keep up-to-date automatically updated and make it reusable
• Can handle the rigors of data integration while maintaining accuracy and and granularity

...

• New technology - needs training and user tutorials
• May not appear to be doing more that a custom Google appliance of the same source systems (or just the institutional domains) – especially until more advantage is taken of the structured nature of the data and the potential to align data from multiple institutions to the same semantic standards (e.g., MeSH, LCSH)
• Exposes duplication of data in the source systems and among systems
  
  • Many instances of URIs for NSF, NIH, geographic places, keywords
  • Same person may appear in results from several institutions and the harvesting does not on its own yet attempt to resolve duplicates
  • Both these issues are better addressed in the source systems where there is local knowledge to validate, but this project can't mandate data cleanup
• Difficulty to place a value on the information, especially with regards to completeness
• Difficult to explain how differs from social networking sites that may be more inclusive but less authoritative – faculty may prefer to see everything and be their own judge of what to consider reliable Difficulty to organize within faculty values (will it be more important than Facebook or LinkedIn?)
• Skeptical user ideas on how application will function and be used
• Struggle to develop initial awareness of technology because it is so new
• Pioneering tool for science community - new innovations often received guardedly |

Threats

• Competitors of other social networking sites - creating value/comfort
• Improvements to commodity search via tags using schema.org annotations to HTML
• Need for data disambiguation – won't support network analysis unless data are aligned prior to indexing, or a new analytical process is developed to disambiguate using the harvested information (or queries going back to fetch more detail).
  • We believe Dave Eichmann at Iowa is developing such approaches, and we should work with him to position this effort as the infrastructure for sustainability and broad application to leverage his exploratory research results 
• Changes in the functionality of web application will affect early adopters (idea of adopting it) |

...

The opportunities include brand awareness and the ability to speed along technological advances. The connection with the institution creates massive distribution channels to effectively market this new application. In addition, the social network aspect of the program continues to expand regardless of the current position of the economy. Many future applications and features can be built, depending on the ways in which a user or user group might like to use supplied content. The personalization capabilities and the ability to add resources to the existing VIVO can occur over time.

In order to succeed with the adoption of VIVO, changes in the functionality of the web application will drastically affect the early adopters. One way to prevent the negative impact of this is to conduct focus groups with a small sample market. This will allow room for improvement and effective training. Another threat is the expansion of competitors, such as developers of other social networking sites. Depending on the functionalities that users value at such sites, this can occupy a user's time and commitment to VIVO. VIVO has some similarities to the typical social networking site but also differs significantly from it in many ways. It also has a competitive advantage in being able to display unique, target-specific information. Until other programs like VIVO are created the threat from other social networking tools is likely to be minimal.