Vitro is a general-purpose web-based ontology and instance editor with customizable public browsing. Vitro was originally developed at Cornell University, and is used as the core of the popular research and scholarship portal, VIVO. Vitro is an integrated ontology editor and semantic web application implemented as a Java web application that runs in a Tomcat servlet container. With Vitro, you can: create or load ontologies in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) format; edit instances and relationships; build a public web site to display your data; and search your data with Apache Solr.
The Cornell LD4L Labs project team will provide library technical services and digital collections catalogers with Vitro-based data editing, display, and dissemination environments that will support the creation and incorporation of subject and collection-specific ontologies to describe the unique aspects of the collection in a structured, extensible, and shareable manner. The tools will also support easy linking to existing external linked data vocabularies and published globally-resolvable entities (e.g., Getty, FAST, WorldCat Entities, LinkedBrainz, and Digital Science GRID).
The Vitro editing tool will be used by LD4P Partners in their metadata production pilots. These pilots will specifically include the Afrika Bambaataa Collection at Cornell and the Columbia Art Properties Collection, but may include other LD4P efforts as well. The Vitro metadata production approaches will be informed by the use cases developed by other LD4P Partner projects.