The sprint started off with six top-level objectives. Based on a reduced team size due to unexpected local priorities, we trimmed the objectives down to the following:

1. Create/Augment developer-facing documentation for the VIVO Scholars application
2. Externalize the currently embedded Triple Pattern Fragment server
3. Add a messaging feature to Vitro

VIVO Scholars

The in-development VIVO Scholars application consists of three primary modules. There is a core module, scholars-discovery, that queries the VIVO triplestore in order to populate a separate Solr index. This module then exposes the content of the Solr index via a REST-API, as well as through a GraphQL endpoint. On top of the REST-API or GraphQL, it is possible for developers to create user interfaces based on JSON data versus RDF triples. There are two additional UI modules that do exactly that. One UI is written with Angular (scholars-angular), and another is written with Go and React (scholars-react).

In an effort to increase engagement from more of the community, documentation was added/updated for these three modules with the objective of simplifying the installation and start-up process. Along with being able to deploy the VIVO Scholars components from the source code, each module also has been Dockerized.

Additional work was put towards making the configuration and customization of VIVO Scholars easier for installations that will want to add their own colors, styles, etc.

Triple Pattern Fragment

In the ongoing effort to make the VIVO codebase more extensible, scalable, and modular, this sprint demonstrated and documented how to install an external Triple Pattern Fragment (TPF) server that serves VIVO content. The upstream project from which VIVO's embedded TPF server was sourced was updated in this sprint to be able to connect to an underlying triplestore via SPARQL-Query, as well updated to be able to deploy in a servlet container, such as Apache Tomcat.

This externalized TPF server was also Dockerized and added to the vivo-docker2 project.

Vitro Messaging

A common pattern for scaling and loosely integrating applications is to use asynchronous messaging. This sprint added a new feature to Vitro that emits messages whenever content is changed in VIVO's triplestore (currently works with TDB store). The messages emitted contain a body in the RDF Patch format. Now it is possible to have decoupled listeners of VIVO/Vitro messages perform any number of tasks based on activity in VIVO.

See the tickets below for more details on what was completed this sprint.