2013-07-17 VIVO Ontology Call

Updates

• Brown
• Florida
• Johns Hopkins
• Scripps
• Virginia Tech
• Weill Cornell
• others

Formalizing a 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.

Working groups will continue to be open to all and to encourage participation by individuals and organizations regardless of their sponsorship status.

It will be helpful to have a conversation on this call and the next call (July 31) about how people would like to conduct this group in the future and what its goals could and should be for the remainder of the VIVO Project incubation period, through the end of calendar 2014.  Ideas might include:

• more explicitly developing and prioritizing issues for upcoming releases
• establishing sub-groups to work on specific areas of interest such as provenance
• working with members of the development team to design and test improvements to the VIVO ontology editor and/or features of VIVO to better manage and reflect ontology-related requirements, including VIVO's additional operational ontologies including the application configuration ontology, display model ontology, authentication and authorization ontology
• working with the Vitro code base as an ontology-driven application platform for projects unrelated to VIVO including Semantic Web education and training
• adapting and extending the VIVO/Integrated Semantic Framework (ISF) ontology for new domains, preferably by evaluating and adopting existing ontology efforts by other parties but also by targeted new ontology work
• working with members of other VIVO Working Groups to improve the ontology to support multi-site search, including issues such as sameAs assertions, shared instance data, and linkages to externally-managed terminologies and authoritative name services for people, organizations, geographic locations, events, or projects
• working with representatives of non-academic organizations to better understand the needs of labs, government or non-profit organizations, or consortia adopting VIVO
• evaluating existing and new tools to support ontology creation, editing, change management, release, and evaluation, ideally in a networked rather than single-user environment
• participating as representatives for VIVO in ontology projects with the W3C or other groups
• establishing a more formal process for moving the Integrated Semantic Framework forward through public releases, in coordination with the eagle-i community and other interested parties and not necessarily strictly tied to VIVO software releases