Formalizing an ISF/VIVO Ontology Working Group

Representatives of each of the organizations sponsoring VIVO (see http://vivoweb.org/sponsorship) will be meeting on Wednesday afternoon, August 14, at the VIVO Conference for the first official VIVO Sponsors Meeting. One item on the agenda is to formalize a set of working groups, with the current and potential activities of this group and listserv providing one example.

Working groups will continue to be open to all and to encourage participation by individuals and organizations regardless of current sponsorship status or ability to become a sponsor.

With release 1.6, VIVO will be adopting a larger ontology derived from both the VIVO and eagle-i ontologies and addressing broader needs in research representation including research resources and clinical expertise. The ontology will be promoted going forward as the Integrated Semantic Framework or ISF, but will continue to be managed by members of the VIVO community together with participants in the CTSAconnect project representing eagle-i and the biomedical research community more generally, as well as other individuals and groups who wish to become involved.

Ideas for activities of the VIVO/ISF Ontology Working Group include:

• more explicitly developing and prioritizing issues for upcoming ISF ontology and VIVO software releases
• establishing sub-groups to work on specific areas of interest such as provenance
• providing opportunities for training on ontologies and how they are used in VIVO and other Semantic Web applications, and on SPARQL and Linked Open Data 
• evaluating existing and new tools to support ontology creation, editing, change management, release, and evaluation
  
  • setting up a shared rather than single-user environment for use in training as well as in developing each successive ontology release
• working with members of the development team to design and test improvements to the VIVO ontology editor and/or features of VIVO to better manage and reflect ontology-related requirements, including VIVO's additional operational ontologies including the application configuration ontology, display model ontology, authentication and authorization ontology
• working with the Vitro code base as an ontology-driven application platform for projects unrelated to VIVO including Semantic Web education and training
• adapting and extending the Integrated Semantic Framework (ISF) ontology for new domains, preferably by evaluating and adopting existing ontology efforts by other parties but also by targeted new ontology work
• working with members of other VIVO DuraSpace Working Groups to improve the ontology to support multi-site search, including issues such as sameAs assertions, shared instance data, and linkages to externally-managed terminologies and authoritative name services for people, organizations, geographic locations, events, or projects
• working with representatives of non-academic organizations to better understand the needs of labs, government or non-profit organizations, or consortia adopting VIVO
• participating as representatives for the ISF in ontology projects with the W3C or other groups
• establishing a more formal process for moving the Integrated Semantic Framework forward through public releases, in coordination with the eagle-i community and other interested parties and not necessarily strictly tied to VIVO software releases

Your thoughts are very much appreciated, and feel free to add comments on this page even if you can't attend two discussion meetings, on July 17 and July 31.

Leadership

Dr. Melissa Haendel from Oregon Health and Science University has agreed to chair the ISF/VIVO Ontology Working Group and representing the working group on the DuraSpace VIVO Project management team.  Brian Lowe from Cornell will server as co-chair, facilitating calls and participating in management team meetings when Melissa is not available.

Membership

Please sign up here if you wish to be included in the Working Group roster of members.  Anyone may participate in the biweekly calls, including more than one person from an organization, regardless of whether the organization has become a sponsor of the VIVO Project.

Please join the ISF/VIVO ontology listserv if you have not already done so.