Wednesday, May 24 at 11:00 EDT

LG members:

Bruce Herbert Christian Hauschke Brian Lowe L Bryan Cooper Fadwa Alshawaf Anna Guillaumet Terrie R. Wheeler Robert Cartolano Damaris Murry @Noah Huffman

Lyrasis: Laurie Gemmill Arp Michele MennielliDragan Ivanovic

Regrets: Sonja SchulzeWashington Luís Ribeiro de Carvalho

Agenda

Updated Agenda for May 2023 VIVO Leadership Group 

Announcements (0 mins)
Eunis Conference. (June Conference in Spain). Anna will present overview of VIVO. Dragan will present on VIVO ontology mapping project.
Please share the VIVO Annual Report: https://vivo.lyrasis.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/AR-2022-VIVO.pdf.  A Spanish language version is also available.
VIVO satellite event at Semantic Web in Libraries, http://swib.org/.  Christian is proposing an ontologyfocused event.
The ORCID Certified Service Provider (CSP) Program and we invite your feedback on the proposed changes.  Please follow this link (bit.ly/3GEyT8K) to read about, and comment on, the draft documents outlining the benefits of the CSP Program, and the industry best practice-based certification criteria for workflows pertaining to Research Information Systems.
Discussion (50 mins)
1. Transferring VIVO Copyright (Terrie, 10 mins)
• Cornell accepted latest suggestions.  This version is at Lyrasis.
2. VIVO Community Finances (Terrie, 10 mins)
3. Discuss our fundamental strategy (Bruce, 50 mins however long it takes)

Note: I was hoping, as Christian and others have pointed out, that we only agree on the importance of this question and establish the right question to ask.)
• Sigma’s and Duke’s challenge
• Estimates of time and effort needed to complete major development milestones (Dragan).

“This is really hard to estimate, but I don't think it might be less than 6 developers' years (meaning 6 
developers for one complete year). The problematic part is VIVO development requires semantic web knowledge and some other specific technologies knowledge, therefore it is not possible to easy enlarge the team with new software developers. It is really crucial that current VIVO committers are included in the process of refactoring, and their availability is questionable even if we got some funding. Anyway, it would be great to have some funding, I hope it might dramatically speed up the development.“
• The original vision of the VIVO community – supporting the semantic web (idealist)
• Institutions need a more sustainable, cheaper RIM/CRIS system.
• This would free up time to explore data analysis, visualizations and AI.
• Could we define an alternative architecture, something that is simpler for an institution to
implement, and data is fed to one graph database that creates the RDF and provides the SPARQL endpoint?

___________________________________________________________________________________________ Meeting via the normal Zoom link: https://lyrasis.zoom.us/j/9963190968

Updated Agenda & Minutes

Wednesday, May 24 at 11:00 EDT

Updated Agenda for May 2023 VIVO Leadership Group

Announcements (0 mins)

Eunis Conference. (June Conference in Spain). Anna will present overview of VIVO. Dragan will present on VIVO ontology mapping project.

Please share the VIVO Annual Report.  A Spanish language version is also available.

VIVO satellite event at Semantic Web in Libraries.  Christian is proposing an ontology-focused event.

The ORCID Certified Service Provider (CSP) Program and we invite your feedback on the proposed changes.  to read about, and comment on, the draft documents outlining the benefits of the CSP Program, and the industry best practice-based certification criteria for workflows pertaining to Research Information Systems.

Discussion (50 mins)

1. Transferring VIVO Copyright (Terrie, 10 mins) 

The VIVO copyright transfer has been signed by all parties and is complete.

1. Discuss our fundamental strategy (Bruce, 50 mins however long it takes)
   
   Note: I was hoping, as Christian and others have pointed out, that we only agree on the importance of this question and establish the right question to ask.)
   • Sigma’s and Duke’s challenge (Graph QL; the proof-of-concept VIVO Scholar code is open source, but the production code customized for Duke's use is not)
     
     
   • Estimates of time and effort needed to complete major development milestones (Dragan).
     
     “This is really hard to estimate, but I don't think it might be less than 6 developers' years (meaning 6 developers for one complete year). The problematic part is VIVO development requires semantic web knowledge and some other specific technologies knowledge, therefore it is not possible to easy enlarge the team with new software developers. It is really crucial that current VIVO committers are included in the process of refactoring, and their availability is questionable even if we got some funding. Anyway, it would be great to have some funding, I hope it might dramatically speed up the development.“
   • The original vision of the VIVO community – supporting the semantic web (idealist)
   • Institutions need a more sustainable, cheaper RIM/CRIS system.
   • This would free up time to explore data analysis, visualizations and AI.
   • Could we define an alternative architecture, something that is simpler for an institution to implement, and data is fed to one graph database that creates the RDF and provides the SPARQL endpoint?

Chair's notes from Discussion:

1. Duke will run pieces of the VIVO system temporarily. Postgres database, GraphQL powers the search and display.
2. Weill Cornell uses angular, JSON exports, needs to use more current technologies.
3. Concentric circles – how do we support innovation along the edges so that they drive innovation in the core.
4. Perhaps the VIVO community can be built around a shared interest in implementing RIM/CRIS systems and not the VIVO code (D). (R) Argued for open data.
5. We lost the ability to customize the flexible system of the original VIVO/ontology (Brian)
6. (Christian) I was at the biggest library conference in Europe today. And knowledge graphs and semantics are still the goal of basically everyone. It's not dead, my personal estimation is that we are now entering the slope of enlightenment in the Gartner Hype cycle. (Rob) I agree the hype is over, and the value based on real user needs and actual systems is emergent.
7. https://medium.com/geekculture/is-the-semantic-web-really-dead-7113cfd1f573
8. Observations from meeting in Costa Rica: Need for open source platform, awareness of VIVO is low.
9. (Anna) ontologies are also good for implementing AI technologies, this new wave. for instance, according to chatGPT, connecting chatGPT to a semantic database it's not only possible, furthermore could allow the language model to better understand information about researchers, their research fields, their activities and their nationality. When querying, the language model could better understand the meaning of the search terms and perform a more accurate and relevant search than if it is on a transactional database. It is possible to perform more sophisticated and relevant questions that can identify the most relevant information and provide more accurate answers.
10. "Do we need a new roadmap for VIVO?" – software, ontology, open data, semantic technology
11. Dragan: we are some months away from having better APIs in VIVO. Dragan can we maybe make a presentation on the Dynamic API in the LG?

Plan on moving forward: the group agreed to organize a one day, online meeting open for the broader VIVO community (with speakers) where we discuss the VIVO roadmap.

1. VIVO Community Finances (Terrie, 10 mins)

The group voted unanimously to accept the budget.