from the 2013-02-20 VIVO Ontology Call:
Research area/interest and description (JHU) - Some faculty would like to separate expertise from research interest, and have description associated with each research area. For a faculty with several research areas, vivo:researchOverview need be sliced for consumption by a project website, which only display description of one or two research areas.
In a brief discussion on the 2013-02-06 VIVO Ontology Call, we ascertained that the descriptions of research interests need to be separate entities linked to both the person and the research area, a concept typically from a controlled vocabulary, that may be linked to by several people and/or organizations or projects. This is not a role but more of an annotation on the connection between the person and the research area or topic.
In continuing the discussion on this call, Brian mentioned a recent focus by the W3C on support for annotations via the http://openannotation.org/spec/core – it seems more straightforward than reification (giving an RDF statement its own URI and adding multiple additional statements about that statement) and appears to be intended for a similar purpose (applying terminology to resources) to what Jing describes as the use case at Hopkins.