Overview

What's New

Triple Pattern Fragments (TPF)

TPF presents a lightweight means of obtaining triples from a linked data application as a web service, with very low overhead, and high reliability (it only pattern matches for triples, there are no arbitrary complex queries, so individual requests can not have a high impact on the server). Since the TPF endpoint does not currently enforce visibility settings for classes or properties set in VIVO, the service is turned off by default. In order to enable the TPF endpoint, a "tpf.activeFlag" property must be added to the runtime.properties file with a value of "true". For this property to take effect, the Tomcat server must be restarted.

tpf.activeFlag = true

See Triple Pattern Fragments

Multi-Lingual Improvements

Several additions and improvements have been made to VIVO's internationalization (i18n). Most notably, the German language translation has been added to the VIVO and Vitro language repositories, and the Internationalization configuration documentation has been updated by community users.

Externalized Search Index

This release takes another step towards the longer-term goal of modularizing and decoupling VIVO components. In order to allow VIVO to use the latest versions of Solr that may be hosted centrally, this release no longer deploys with a bundled search index, but rather provides for connecting to an external one. As a part of this update, early (non-production) testing has been explored around supporting ElasticSearch as an alternative to Solr.

See configuration instructions.

ORCiD API

This release includes an improvement to the ORCiD integration that streamlines the process of connecting a VIVO profile with the associated ORCiD profile based on whether the VIVO installation is using the 'public' or 'member' ORCiD API.

The following elements have been added to the runtime.properties configuration:

orcid.apiLevel = public | member

Docker

In conjunction with the effort to modularize and decouple VIVO components, this release also demonstrates that modularization by establishing Docker infrastructure for deploying the following modules as separate containers:

• Solr
• MariaDB
• VIVO webapp

The vivo-docker2 can be cloned and deployed with custom configuration.

$ docker-compose up

Additional Error Checking During Builds

The Maven projects now integrate Google's Error Prone - http://errorprone.info/ - tool into the compilation to detect serious errors in the Java code. Any customisations and contributions will now automatically be checked, preventing many serious errors from entering the code base.

Testing Framework

The Selenium IDE tests have been updated to use specific named selectors, rather than positions. Additional attributes (domain and range for faux properties) have been added to the UI to allow for this.

This allows the tests to be run against both the old (wilma) and new (tenderfoot) themes, and will make the tests more robust in the event of future ontology changes.

Note that Selenium IDE no longer works with the current versions of Firefox. Whilst we can currently run the test suite using a Java project and WebDriver, we will need to consider how these tests can be maintained in the future.

Issues Resolved

Sub-task

Bug

New Feature

Task

Improvement

Test

Code Task

Documentation

Release Managers

Ralph O'Flinn, University of Alabama, Birmingham

Contributors