VIVO Scholar is under development. The beta version is planned to be released in spring of 2020.
Background
The VIVO Scholar Task Force addresses one of the goals in the Product Direction for 2019, "Modernize the Presentation Layer," which is a priority for many existing and prospective VIVO implementers. VIVO Scholar builds on the work of the Product Evolution Task Force, employing many of the ideas and technologies explored by that group. VIVO Scholar is also informed by the work of participants in the Architectural Fly-in Meeting held in January 2019.
Deliverables
VIVO Scholar consists of these components:
- A Spring Data middleware component, Scholars Discovery which includes:
- Data from the existing VIVO implementation
- A Solr index
- A GraphQL endpoint to provide an easy, developer-friendly mechanism for obtaining VIVO data (see video for interacting with GraphQL interface)
- The VIVO Scholar site, a read-only user interface that displays public profiles, provides a faceted search, and enables users to browse VIVO data
- The VIVO Scholar interface will conform with the Worldwide Web Consortium Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.0, Level AA Conformance (WCAG 2.0 Level AA)
Architectural diagram
Goals and benefits
Goals
VIVO Scholar is being designed to be:
- Fast–-when loading pages and when retrieving VIVO data in near real-time
- Developer-friendly so it's easy to implement and customize
- Attractive and modern
- Responsive to many devices and accessible for users with disabilities
- Fully supportive of multiple languages
Existing VIVO implementations can:
- Add VIVO Scholar to their VIVO project and customize it to their institution OR
- Develop their own user interface using the data in the GraphQL endpoint
New VIVO implementations can:
- Install VIVO and VIVO Scholar, using VIVO to edit data and permissions OR
- Install VIVO and develop their own user interface using the GraphQL endpoint
Institutional benefits
Aside from being fast, modern, attractive, responsive, and easily-customized, VIVO Scholar offers an important component for institutions: the GraphQL endpoint.
The GraphQL endpoint works like VIVO widgets does for many institutions such as Duke; with GraphQL, developers can quickly and easily feed data to their own websites.
- At Duke, almost 85% of faculty have department profiles using VIVO data.
- Faculty and staff are very motivated to update their local websites, which updates VIVO.
- Widgets save web developers significant time by re-using data with little development effort.
- VIVO provides an institutional workflow for faculty to update their data in one place. "Update once, use everywhere."
- Using GraphQL, data is updated when VIVO is updated, nearly in real time.
