Page History

Updates

• Brown (Steve) – no recent changes to the ontology except adding some document classes that individual faculty members wanted to see – e.g., Engineering faculty wanted to see workshop papers to be a sibling of conference paper.
  
  • Looking ahead to the presentation at the Conference and ongoing humanities work is trying to distill main points:
    
    • the notion of a new class for some kind of canonical work that is distinct from a standard document (drawing on the idea of a canonical course as it relates to individual semester courses as events)
      
      • for example, to handle works that have gone through multiple editions or been updated over time
      • should the most recent edition be the reference point for the canonical work
      • a central concern, and more immediate because some faculty members asked a very good question about presentations that get given repeatedly over time, and where a common link is desired as a way to tie all those presentations together
    • can we take advantage of the provenance ontology (Prov-o by the W3C)? Steve has been looking at that and is interested in it for other
      
      • what about physical works? are they still information resources?
      • entities and artifacts created by agents, with predecessor-successor
      • both the VIVO and the prov-o ontology skirt the issue of
        
        • as long as a resource has some sort of representation
        • but how do we represent the abstract concept – implicitly through the stand-in as a web page is the stand-in for the person
        • the canonical course is the only place where we've addressed the concept of a canonical thing
        • would be on firmer ground if we come up with something that makes sense with the Basic Formal Ontology
• Florida
• Johns Hopkins (Jing) – not many changes in ontology either; looking at other sources, and suddenly quite a few ontologies floating around
  
  • W3C organization ontology is in a candidate recommendation now
  • also the Semantic Web Conference Ontology – conferences and presentations, but dates back to 2009
  • has been looking at Web Protege site – a sandbox set up by Stanford that can sign up for an upload to
  • with respect to the Prov-o ontology – has some notion of abstract concepts, and usage as well as derivative works
    
    • has a question about processes 
• Scripps
• Virginia Tech (Michaeleen)
  • Continuing to work on Grants ingest from NIH Reporter
  Gail) – first meeting of the VIVO pilot team yesterday – 7 people from systems, data management, and data informatics
  • will be piloting with people from the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology and the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, plus some other possible additional faculty
  • about 125 faculty
  • 1.5 year time frame leading to a report
  • about to hire to hire a systems analyst/programmer for the VIVO project
  • Julie Speer and Tyler Walters will be at the Conference
  Virginia Tech
• Weill Cornell
• others

Formalizing

...

an ISF/VIVO

...

Ontology Working Group

Representatives of each of the organizations sponsoring VIVO (see http://vivoweb.org/sponsorship) will be meeting on Wednesday afternoon, August 14, at the VIVO Conference for the first official VIVO Sponsors Meeting. One item on the agenda is to formalize a set of working groups, with the current and potential activities of this group and listserv providing one example.

...

Your thoughts are very much appreciated, and feel free to add comments on a wiki discussion page for the VIVO-ISF Ontology Working Group even if you can't attend these two meetings.

...

Feedback from today's meeting:

• (Jing) – a need for more training on the ontology, and for a common working space
• (Steve) – identifying needs but also helping people out
  
  • learning about ontologies
  • sees the priorities as the first two bullets above, with then outreach into new domains
  • sees cross-pollination across groups and various VIVO implementers as very important
• (Gail) – training is also important
  
  • also relates to the 3rd bullet from the bottom (evaluating existing and new tools to support ontology creation, editing, change management, release, and evaluation, ideally in a networked rather than single-user environment)
• (Steve) – learning more about the ISF and BFO to see where the VIVO project is going and being able to help incorporate new domains into VIVO as well as learn more about how to create an ontology that is consistent with an upper level ontology
• (Jon) – we could have more focused calls, such as the first week of the month for training, the second for prioritizing changes for the next release, 3rd for topical discussions or invited speakers, etc.
  • Gail – endorses that idea