Linking via concept services

Many people have requested support for associating terms from established controlled vocabularies with people, publications, grants, organizations, and other types of data in VIVO. While small taxonomies or vocabularies may most easily be imported in their entirety into VIVO, a number of the more popular controlled vocabularies are very large in proportion to the number of terms likely to be referenced within a single VIVO instance. Incorporating terms by reference helps keep terms in sync as these vocabularies continue to evolve and is more consistent with linked data principles.

Stony Brook University's Department of Medical Bioinformatics, led by Dr. Moisés Eisenberg, hosts an RDF version of the National Library of Medicine's Unified Medical Language System or UMLS (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/). Through a 2011 VIVO mini-grant, Stony Brook has developed a web service that accepts incoming term requests from VIVO and returns one or more matching UMLS concepts with stable URIs. VIVO displays the label associated with the UMLS concept but the concept's URI ensures that references remain unambiguous, even across multiple VIVO instances at different institutions.

The interface from VIVO to the UMLS service has been implemented to allow linking to additional vocabulary services such as GEMET (http://www.eionet.europa.eu/gemet), and we will offer additional choices in upcoming releases.

VIVO RDF statements referencing external concepts

When external concepts are added to VIVO, they retain their original URI from the external vocabulary.  Since we have no way of knowing whether these URIs represent OWL classes or RDF instance data, VIVO does not assert a type for the concepts, which will therefore only be interpreted as being of type owl:Thing.