Raw Data: What do you see as VIVO’s top goals in the next 2-3 years?
| Data integration and standardization across multiple systems - Cerif, ORCID, ScienCV, Profiles, LOKI, etc. | Key partnerships with outside community | Aligning each VIVO instance's extensions, data across the consortium, and its reuse in other applications | |
| Having a closer partnership with each VIVO instance | Quality ontology/standards management and development for a better integration into the software stack (or for other applications as well). | Ingest – select (or develop) an entry-level ingest tool and thoroughly support its use with tutorials, examples, and workshops. | |
Core – continue to improve modularity, with plug-and-play triple-stores and reasoners. | Core – lower the bar to entry with a binary distribution; no database, no Ant, no Tomcat, no Vagrant, just a Java runtime required. | Outreach – convey usability, maturity, and coherence in all aspects of web presence. Crowdsourcing will not accomplish this. | |
| A stable community built and supported ontology. VIVO needs to build a larger and more stable ontology community that is in sync with downstream consumers of VIVO data. For example, Profiles RNS sites still exist emitting data in 1.4 ontology. What is the future of their data? | More data out. The community needs to give more effort into producing ( or facilitating the production of ) secondary data sets that are useable by administrative folks (aka donors, funders) and academics alike. Dave Eichmann at IOWA is doing a great job of this using harvested VIVO data. | More developers. VIVO needs more developers. VIVO needs to work on getting in tune with the preferred working methods of the cohort of probable developers in the communities that seem to be attracting themselves to VIVO. This may require surveying or reaching out to this group about this particular topic. | |
Make and easy to install, default configuration, application- reduce flexibility and increase simplicity Increase the number of adopters worldwide, including lead institutions that can set an example for others and contribute to the project | Expand the community to be more inclusive, democratic, and diversified so can start building a robust community source project | Clearer articulation of the value proposition to the academic community | |
| Better marketing and branding, not only of the product(s) but of the community's vision | More complete and accessible documentation | Streamlined web presence; straightforward, timely communications that can be easily understood by prospective users or contributors | |
| A software release process that's driven not by incremental improvements desired by existing users but by exciting and useful new features that can capture the imagination and energy of new adopters | To develop a VIVO search tool, to expand our capabilities to support new VIVO implementations and to add/improve features like CVs, visualizations, embedded content and other cool "gadgets" | Increased open source commiter activity on the Vitro and VIVO projects, e.g. coordination of more code sprints and hackathons. | |
Releasing VIVO Search or supporting a similar solution like DIRECT2Experts. | Providing input for use case driven evolution of the VIVO-ISF data standard. | Increased adoption by universities and research institutions, e.g. having more than 100 active VIVO implementations in production. | |
Transforming an informal network of committed individuals into a sustainable community offering transparent governance, the capability to deliver production-quality software and ontology, and an openness to new ideas and directions | Communicating where we are as a community, what we offer, and how we can partner with other organizations and movements to achieve goals such as shared identifiers and data interoperability | Attracting new contributors (financial and in-kind) to the community by broadening VIVO’s reach in the sciences and biomedicine, in the humanities, and in libraries through closer integration with DuraSpace’s other communities supporting research data and repository technologies | |
| Achieving performance optimisations | A more modular software structure where user developed functionality could more easily be plugged into the software build | Strengthen the open technical community and provide more training and "VIVO in the wild" showcases (e.g. it seems hard still to find out who is running instances at their institutions, which increases the difficulty of understanding who is doing what and who to ask to come out and play) | |
| A key strength of the technology is the distribution (federation) of data ... this needs more attention in the beginning with stronger and more compelling demonstrations of that strength (this is particularly a problem when you don't know who is running VIVO) | Expanding the core services beyond the university faculty/staff information use case. | Increased adoption | |
Progress on VIVO search | Researcher personalisation: allowing some look and feel choice (citation style etc) | SEO (how to get as much traffic as an academia.edu/ research gate ) | |
| Uptake: -> increase in new Universities using VIVO platforms | Getting VIVO search up and running | More contributions to both the software and ontology from community members who are using the platform to solve real information problems and deliver services. | |
| Clearer communication of community activities ( user documentation, software release schedule, working groups, etc) so that active members know where things are headed and potential members can learn about activities. | Clearer communication of VIVO's value proposition over other systems or data model in this space. | Encouraging the release and development of community developed tools and software to support VIVO implementations. | |
| Develop a growing community of members who value VIVO and want to support it | Figure out how to best attract, fund, organize, and retain resources for getting work done | Improve communications, transparency, and participation | |
| Make it easier for new institutions to implement VIVO | Create a thriving, diverse community of VIVO committers and contributors | Make community-based VIVO apps and tools discoverable, reusable, maintainable | |
Humanities and social sciences (HSS) ontology development | Grants management enhancements | Global adoption | |
Growing the user community and resources available for that community. The current scale of development and implementation is quite small. Though there are a number of high profile members, the scale if VIVO development and implementation must expand significantly if the product is to become a stable long term development platform for research profiling in the same way the fedora and dspace are standard solutions for repositories. | As part of the challenge outlined above - a specific set of tasks exist around modularising the codebase to allow for small targeted contributions of code and to facilitate the deployment and configuration of 3rd party modules that enhance base vivo functionality. Aligned with these activities is the facilitation of activites to allow VIVO to be deployed within a wide variety of software stack eg. use of alternate triple stores etc. (ie. more of a loosely coupled architecture) without harming the "easy to get started" experience for less technical users and institutions | Increasing the discoverability of and display of information presented via VIVO, eg. search engine optimisation by enhancement of templates with mappings of information to schema.org (for search engines) and markup for social sharing on facebook and twitter. Decreasing the "bounce-rate" and short duration of visits to VIVO sites by automating the production of "sticky" content that users will engage with. (Better linking between entities in vivo sites, not just as a product of direct relations, but for "similar" content etc) | |
| Maintaining the technical and feature advantage of VIVO over other platforms, particularly ones deployed outside of institutions, eg. academia.edu, researchgate, impact story, figshare and the like. All of these external platforms have compelling value propositions for individual academics and may impact on take up of VIVO at an institutional level. Effective integration with all of these external platforms may act to reduce the challenge they represent. | Better integration with content management systems from fedora (data management app development frameworks) to drupal (standard off the shelf content management) will prepare VIVO for a future of facilitating direct access to research data and related resources. | Finalising a solid draft of the VIVO-ISF ontology, developing mappings to other common related ontologies and driving the adoption of VIVO-ISF in other products will be instrumental in growing the developer base, tools and utilities around VIVO. Keeping third party software vendors along for the transition to this ontology (eg. Symplectic) will be key. Bringing other vendors to the table, eg. Elsevier Pure, etc will ensure that VIVO is a standard choice, rather than a difficult one for institutions looking to deploy a research profiling system. Future ontology development will require better tool for migrating data and ingest pathways from one iteration of the ontology to another. Ensuring that existing VIVO installs have the documentation and support required to migrate to up-to-date versions of the platform/ontology will ensure that the landscape within the VIVO community does not become too fragmented. | |
Grow the installed base. This brings new people, ideas, resources to VIVO and creates a positive feedback loop. More effort, better product, more adoption, more effort.
| To grow the installed base, we need to improve the value proposition. | Improve the value proposition for VIVO by reducing the effort required to create and maintain a VIVO. | |
| Create apps that address the various purposes for VIVO above. | |||
