This page is part 2 of a short, self-paced tour introducing VIVO for use in an interactive workshop or online.
What's different (and noteworthy) about VIVO?
Our tour example – vivo.vivoweb.org
Vivo.vivoweb.org is a VIVO community tool to help connect users of VIVO based on geographic location, institutional type or affiliation, stage of implementing VIVO, or individual expertise. It's largely populated and updated by the community using a shared login, and provides a place for people new to VIVO to try out the software while learning about the larger VIVO community.
The vivo.vivoweb.org site extends the standard ISF/VIVO ontology with a few classes and relationships to highlight VIVO installations and the typical range of skills needed to set up, populate, and maintain a VIVO instance (as discussed more in part 3 of this tour).
VIVO's not just people.
VIVO is not just people profiles or the usual static mix of department and faculty web pages. If you try a search for 'ontology' you'll see results about people, events, organizations, installations, and research. Each distinct type of entity represented in VIVO has its own attributes and relationships to others of itself or of other types, sometimes directly or sometimes through intermediate connections indicating roles or a time frame for the relationship. VIVO has to be able to change as people take on new projects, are promoted, or move to a different department or institution.
A publication in VIVO is modeled not as one entity but as several – the article or book itself, a journal or publisher, each author, and additional objects representing the date of publication, editors or translators, and author order. Publications modeled individually rather than just embedded as text citations on a person's web page can be linked to each co-author and assembled into reports by journal, topic, academic department, research grant or facility, or time period.
Making connections explicit.
On most websites, the only way to find related items is to search for them and hope they share common terminology. That works in VIVO too, as in searching for 'Pennsylvania', but notice when you click on any of the results
