VIVO

A big "thank you" to everyone who participated in the VIVO Conference which was held at the New York Hall of Science on August 12-13.  The conference was a wonderful opportunity for many different people to come together in the spirit of scholarly collaboration and discovery. We were excited to see the wonderful work that is being done across many different institutions and organizations.

We've had a terrific response to the conference over the last two weeks and there have been several requests to make the materials available online.  We are currently gathering the conference materials and will make them available shortly on http://vivoweb.org.

We're already planning next year's conference, which will be held at the Gaylord National Hotel & Convention Center in Washington, DC August 23-26, 2011.  We hope to see you there!

The VIVO project is pleased to announce the second public release of the VIVO software under the "VIVO: Enabling National Networking of Scientists" project (NIH U24 RR029822). As with previous releases, VIVO incorporates development from three of the sites on the project - Cornell University, University of Florida, and Indiana University.

VIVO 1.1 includes publications-related visualizations contributed by the Indiana University development team, under the direction of Micah W. Linnemeier and Dr. Katy Börner. These initial visualizations leverage the semantic structure of VIVO to show co-author relationships as well as a simple timeline of recent publication counts and co-author counts. Network and tabular data can be downloaded in standard formats for further processing.

In response to feedback from the implementation sites, the 1.1 release also includes significant improvements to data display, image upload, login, and the editing interface. Interactive features such as context-sensitive auto-complete data entry functionality will significantly streamline data entry, especially for publications, a core data element contributing to researcher networking. Coming development will build on code changes in this release to significantly improve navigation and browse functionality for the next release, as well as provide a more flexible visual theme customization and institutional branding for the VIVO application.

The version 1.1 ontology^! changes and documentation also reflect input from the full ontology team, representing all 7 sites on the project. Notable changes include improved support for distinct and time-dependent roles in activities, closer alignment of the VIVO ontology with the Bibliographic Ontology (http://bibliontology.com), and changes to facilitate direct interoperability with the Eagle-i Project, a research resource networking project also funded by NIH.

A beta version of a new VIVO Harvester application has been posted for download, evaluation, and feedback on a newly-established SourceForge site (http://vivo.sourceforge.net). This site will enable development of an open-source software development community around VIVO and hosts software, ontologies, and technical documentation from the VIVO project members and other contributors.

The VIVO Harvester application will grow over the coming year into a fully-featured tool for download, processing, and ingest into VIVO a variety of data types from national and/or local systems of record, focusing initially on publications and grants data. This initial Harvester version downloads publications from the Pubmed database for loading in VIVO or for use in other applications; it can allows via OAI or SQL. The VIVO 1.1 release includes extensions and interface improvements for the data ingest functions inside VIVO as well, with further documentation and workflow improvements expected in coming months.

VIVO is publicly available as an open-source project under the BSD Software License (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php) and available on SourceForge at http://vivo.sourceforge.net; the VIVO 1.1 ontology is also publicly available at http://vivoweb.org/ontology/core. Vivoweb.org also serves as the public home for information about the project, educational and support materials, contact information, and direct software downloads.

Discounted early registration for the VIVO conference ends tomorrow, July 15th.  Please see the conference website for more details.

Tomorrow is also the deadline for late breaking short paper and poster submissions.  Please submit your abstract and the completed submission form at the
conference submission site, http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=vivo1.

 For further details or
inquiries, please contact Kristi Holmes at holmeskr@wustl.edu.

VIVO has begun a pilot project to evaluate the process by which Scopus Custom Data can be used to populate institutional VIVO instances. The pilot project, carried out by the VIVO development team at the University of Florida, utilizes a Scopus Custom Data dataset and will serve as a proof of concept with respect to integrating Scopus Custom Data into individual VIVO instances for discovery across the VIVO network. Read more here.