Introduction to VIVO
Paul Albert & Ryan Cobine
Code4Lib
February 7, 2011

VIVO aims to address certain
intractable problems of academia
- Finding collaborators
- Automatically generating list of all a person’s
publications
- Inferring a researcher’s expertise
- Outputting a researcher’s work in a standard format
such as a CV or a biosketch.
- Easily moving institutional data from one system to
another

Preview of version 1.2
http://is.gd/562IU5

Index lists
most classes

Browse by class

Search using
facets

Individual profile
Faculty
Affairs
User Input
Course
Scopus management
Faculty Grants DB
Affairs

Co-author visualizations

Is VIVO really Facebook
for researchers???

FarmVille applic ation for VIVO
currently i n development!
Version 1.0 drops June 2011

Not Facebook Reason #1
Open
source

Open
data
Not Facebook Reason #2

VIVO’s data is from
authoritarian sources.
LOL he means
authoritative
#hatemyjob
Not Facebook Reason #3

Not Facebook Reason #4
Embraces
semantic
approach

A Brief History of VIVO
2003 – VIVO created for local use at Cornell University
(Ithaca) by life sciences
2009 – The US National Center for Research Resources
(NIH) awards the VIVO Collaboration a two-year $12.2
million grant to improve VIVO
2010 Apr. – Version 1.0 released
2010 Aug. – Version 1.1
2010 Oct. – First VIVO conference (NYC); version 1.1.1
2011 Feb. – Version 1.2 and Harvester version 1.0
2011 Aug. – Second VIVO conference (D.C.)

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Collaboration & coordination
Publishers and aggregators – Elsevier, Thomson Reuters,
ORCID, Collexis, Information Today, CiteSeer, Arxiv
Ontology – Eagle-I, BIBO, FOAF, UCSF
Federal agencies – OTSP, NIH, NSF, VA, USDA
Search providers – Google, Bing, Yahoo
Professional societies – AAAS
Semantic web community – DERI, Tim Berners-Lee,
MyExperiment, ConceptWeb, Linked Data
Schools and consortia – SURA, CTSA, CIC, CBC, HubZero,
FLR, dozens of individual schools
Existing application and service providers – over 100

Local systems Data aggregators Individuals or
of record and repositories their proxies
Human resources
Academic affairs
Grants databases
Sources of data
Clinical databases
Events calendar
Credentialing DB
Course database

Local data flow in VIVO
local
systems of
record
data ingest VIVO shared as
ontologies (RDF) RDF
(RDF)
national
sources RDF harvest
SPARQL endpoint
interactive
input

Data in VIVO is stored using Resource
Description Framework (RDF)
Subject Predicate Object
Walter Mondale head of Trilateral Commission

Semantic representation of data
has author
Andrew McDonald
Mining the record: Historical evidence for… author of academic staff
research area in
research area for academic staff
has author
author of
taught by
research area crop management
Susan Riha
teaches
research area for
headed by
CSS 4830 NYS WRI
head of
faculty appointment in
features faculty members
person
featured in Earth and Atmospheric
Sciences
Cornell’s supercomputers crunch weather data to help
farmers manage chemicals

VIVOs can connect with one another

VIVO enables authoritative
data about researchers to
join the Linked Data cloud.
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An accessible introduction
to the semantic web

Fine Arts
Draw organizational charts
Health and Human Performance
Pharmacy
http://vivoweb.org/files/orgLast.pdf
Design, Construction and Planning
University of Florida
Law
Nursing
Business Journalism
Dentistry
Education
Agricultural and Life Sciences

Repurpose content into Drupal
http://bit.ly/gmm8Ng

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- Adopt VIVO
- Provide data
- Develop an application
- Ask questions – vivoweb.org/contact
- Chat – irc.freenode.net #vivo
Get involved