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- See the agenda and schedule of presentations
- The presentation by Jack Rejtman on The Conversation stimulated discussion on now to publish a channel of information on research for public consumption, and also pointed out opportunities for pushing content into VIVO as well as pulling from it.
- There were also presentations from Figshare --a site for keeping research datasets online – and on Altmetrics -- ratings of researchers by analyzing alternative sources like the number of tweets about a project
- A speaker from the Group of Eight, an association of the top research universities in Australia, and the Astra Project, an application of STAR METRICS in Australia.
- One thought to emerge from discussions: "Serendipity should be an explicit research strategy."
Impressions of the Australian research environment
- Jim Blake from Cornell and Alex Viggio from the University of Colorado-Boulder attended the conference and shared their impressions.
- It's amazing what people are doing with VIVO in Australia, based on demonstrations from Griffith, Melbourne, and the University of Western Australia – each has extended VIVO in different and interesting ways
- It's very evident that reporting requirements in Australia mean that universities typically have more data already gathered and well-organized for reporting. A VIVO implementation does not have to involve as much heavy lifting in creating or correcting data as is often the case in the U.S.
- We need to make the process of submitting and accepting contributions to the core code easier, and also to contribute documentation such as manuals, videos, marketing examples, or technology explanations
- There's some concern about how moving customizations made in VIVO v1.4.1 to VIVO v1.5.1
Top questions asked at the conference for VIVO leaders and community
- (Mark Fallu, Griffith) – quite a number of the customizations that Australian universities have done involve tools and utilities developed around VIVO – yes, these are welcome additionsl to the community, also
- Griffith is working with VIVO v1.5.1 to adapt customizations and Mark reports that many VIVO changes would support these customizations more easily, so the customizations can be a thinner layer
- They are particularly fans of generating pages with SPARQL queries and have built a lot of little APIs that are just JSON result wrappers to SPARQL queries
Quick status updates featuring Asia Pacific, European, and Central American sites
Netherlands
- Nick Veenstra from Technische Universiteit Eindhoven reported on the January VIVO workshop in Amsterdam
- The Dutch consortium of the national library and the 13 major university libraries has okayed a project to study the VIVO software together as a successor to the Metis information database that supports theNARCIS search. Already 6 out of the 13 are interested and two are starting VIVO implementations soon.
- They are looking at what system of identifiers to use, and are considering ORCIDs; there is also a system of identifiers in the Netherlands known as Digital Author Identifiers
Costa Rica
- Federico Sancho from Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture, an international organization specializing in agriculture and serving government and public institutions throughout Central and South America, is pursuing an endeavor to improve science through linking agriculture professionals, including connectors to the US Department of Agriculture and their VIVO system.
- Internationalization of VIVO is very important to this effort, and they are working with the Collegio de Postgraduados in Mexico to facilitate a Spanish language translation of the VIVO interface
Upcoming VIVO events
- 2013 VIVO Implementation Fest April 25 & 26 in Boulder, Colorado, on the University of Colorado campus
- 2013 VIVO Conference August 14-16 in St. Louis, Missouri
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