The VIVO and Fedora communities have recognized their potential complementarity for some time, as is natural given the origins of both in the library community. These discussions have typically focused either on ways Fedora could complement a typical VIVO or in return on how VIVO could complement a typical Fedora repository.
- The Datastar project from 2008-2010 at Cornell illustrated the use case of Fedora complementing VIVO by providing a repository for storing datasets uploaded to Fedora through VIVO. A customized VIVO provided an editing and discovery interface for dataset metadata, while Fedora provided repository functions for the dataset itself, such as support for dataset download and versioning.
- The Deep Carbon Observatory, led by Principal Investigator Peter Fox at RPI, uses VIVO as a data portal in concert with CKAN and Drupal, as described in Implementation of Open-World, Integrative, Transparent, Collaborative Science Data Platforms
- Institutional repositories such as UR Research at the University of Rochester sometimes feature pages for the researchers themselves, in addition to repository collections and resources, to support browsing by researcher and to provide an extra incentive for uploading content. While not powered by either Fedora or VIVO, UR Research illustrates another straightforward use case for Fedora-VIVO interoperability.
With the rapid growth of The Hydra Project and the transition to Fedora 4 with its greater reliance on RDF there new opportunities for closer connections between VIVO and Fedora, both at the Vitro (software only) and VIVO (software plus ontology plus ontology-related customization) levels.
A number of platforms and communities could potentially be involved:
- Sufia (on GitHub) repository platform exemplified by Scholarsphere at Penn State
- Project Blacklight
- Apache Solr enterprise search platform, already used by both VIVO and Fedora
- Apache Camel routing and mediation platform used by Fedora 4
- W3C Linked Data Platform, also used by Fedora 4
- Linked Data for Libraries use cases
- Use Case 1 (annotations to create virtual collections,tagging scholarly information resources to support reuse), both using Rails gems
- Use Case 2 (linking Cornell Library catalog with VIVO, URIs in library records), using VIVO
- ActiveTriples
- Hydra RDF Working Group