Overview

VIVO is built on a foundation of Vitro.  

Vitro is an open source, general purpose, semantic web engine.  Vitro has no domain knowledge.  Given ontologies regarding a domain, Vitro supports the editing of the ontology, creation of individuals, management of individuals on "pages" which it generates, organization of individuals into "class groups," indexing, search, faceted browsing, query, import, and export.  Vitro has been used to manage collections of clinical trials, spaceships, library catalogs, datasets, and many more.

VIVO is Vitro with an ontology for representing scholarship, and a set of displays and visualizations that support the use of data for expert finding, team building, assessment, and other VIVO use cases.

Software view

The arrangement of software in VIVO/Vitro is show below.

an enterprise class software system relying on numerous open source software components.  Fundamentally, VIVO relies on Vitro (see below).  VIVO adds a collection of ontologies (see Ontology Reference) to represent data about scholarship.

Vitro

Vitro can be built an operated independently of VIVO.  VIVO is completely dependent on Vitro.

VIVO

VIVO is a customized Vitro.  The table below shows how VIVO compares to Vitro.

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Component View

VIVO, with Vitro, as "made" out of components, including other open source software components.  The figure below shows the various software components that are used in a VIVO/Vitro system.

Additional Resources