VIVO

Invited Speakers

It is our pleasure to announce the first confirmed invited speakers for the 3rd Annual VIVO Conference. We are honored to include David Baker, David Eichmann and Laurel Haak in this year's speaker lineup.

Welcome to the program! 

David Baker, Executive Director, CASRAI

 
David Baker is co-founder and Executive Director of Consortia Advancing Standards in Research Administration Information (CASRAI).
 
He has over twenty years of experience in research administration and management. His roles have included the design and implementation of grants management databases and software systems as well as the provision of senior advisory services to federal, provincial and foundation funding organizations. He has a strong commitment to, and involvement in, international not-for-profit initiatives on research data standards and systems-interoperability. He is based in Ottawa.

David Eichmann, Director, Biomedical Informatics, ICTS, University of Iowa

 
David Eichmann is Director of Biomedical Informatics in the Institute for Clinical and Translational Science (ICTS), the home for the University of Iowa's Clinical and Translational Science Award.
 
His primary academic appointment is in the School of Library and Information Science, where he was Director for five years prior to assuming his current role in the ICTS.  He holds secondary appoints in Computer Science and in the Health Informatics and Information Science tracks in the Iowa Graduate Program in Informatics.  Prior to returning to Iowa, he chaired the Software Engineering Program at the University of Houston - Clear Lake, where he was also Director of Research and Development for the NASA-funded Repository-Based Software Engineering project.  He is past chair of the CTSA Consortium Communications Key Function Committee and is currently co-chair of the CTSA Consortium Research Networking Affinity Group.  His current research interests involve exploring the boundaries between traditional approaches to research data warehousing, information retrieval and extraction, and semantic web^! technologies.

Laurel Haak, Executive Director, ORCID

 
Laurel L. Haak (Laure), PhD, is the Executive Director of ORCID, an international and interdisciplinary non-profit organization dedicated to providing the technical infrastructure to generate and maintain unique and persistent identifiers for researchers and scholars.
 
Dr. Haak earned a BS and MS in Biology at Stanford University, completed her PhD in neuroscience at Stanford University Medical School, and conducted postdoctoral research at the National Institutes of Health. Following postdoctoral work, she served as editor of Science Magazine's NextWave Postdoc Network, a weekly publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Dr. Haak was a program officer at the National Academies, where she directed workforce policy studies on international students, interdisciplinary research, women faculty, postdoctoral researchers, and innovation policy. She also served as Chief Science Officer at Discovery Logic, a Thomson Reuters business, where she provided research evaluation and policy expertise and was responsible for strategic partnerships.

Important Dates

May 30:  Call for Papers submission deadline
May 31:  $350 early bird registration ends
July 20:  InterContinental room block ends ($129/night)
July 31:  Call for Apps contest deadline

The Leaders of the VIVO Project team (VIVO) and the Consortia Advancing Standards in Research Administration Information (CASRAI) are today announcing a collaboration to advance a common global approach to research interoperability.

VIVO is an open source^! ontology^! and software system designed at Cornell University for researchers and used in many universities in the USA that has attracted interest more widely internationally.  It is based on the Semantic Web / Linked Open Data concept.  Recent development has been supported by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, U24 RR029822, through a consortium of universities led by the University of Florida and including Cornell University, Indiana University, Ponce School of Medicine, The Scripps Research Institute, Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine, and Weill Cornell Medical College.

CASRAI is a non-profit standards development organization. CASRAI is an international community of leading research funders and institutions collaborating to ensure seamless interoperability of research information. They collectively develop and maintain a common data dictionary and advance best practices for data exchange and reuse between research teams, institutions, and funding agencies throughout the entire life-cycle of research activity.

"The VIVO community recognizes the need for broader input into the VIVO ontology from the academic, government, and private sectors, within the U.S. and internationally," says Jon Corson-Rikert, the VIVO Development Lead and member of the VIVO Ontology Team. "CASRAI offers a uniquely independent and technology-neutral process for assembling, reviewing, and recommending common data elements and their interrelationships, going beyond people to other key research activities and resources.  We look forward to joining the CASRAI dictionary process and helping to launch a U.S. component of this important effort."

"Research interoperability at a global scale is a puzzle with many pieces," says David Baker, CASRAI Executive Director, "The CASRAI dictionary is just one piece of that puzzle. Implementations like VIVO are another crucial piece. VIVO makes it possible to integrate data about researchers between multiple institutions. A common international language for research information combined with a diverse network of systems that speak this language puts seamless research interoperability within our reach."

The VIVO and CASRAI collaboration will focus on:

• advancing a common global approach to interoperability within the US research community,
• advancing ontology-centric views of the CASRAI dictionary,
• advancing the Semantic Web as a medium for global research information sharing.

This partnership will further facilitate a diverse collection of activities associated with the VIVO project, across federal agencies, professional societies, data providers, and a variety of efforts with the Semantic Web and ontology development communities. The VIVO/CASRAI collaboration to advance a common approach to research interoperability will also serve to enhance the efforts at VIVO implementations across the United States and around the world as scholars look to share their research efforts and promote their expertise. Significant partners of the VIVO project include: the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture), the ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) Initiative, the American Psychological Association and the Publish Trust Project, Symplectic Limited, Wellspring Worldwide, and the Australian-based ANDS VIVO project, a collaboration of the University of Melbourne, Queensland University of Technology, and Griffith University. The cooperation will strengthen the VIVO team‚ augment VIVO and CASRAI's international links and provide many opportunities for joint developments to the benefit of the worldwide research community.

For more information contact:

VIVO contact:
Jon Corson-Rikert
Head, Information Technology Services
201 Albert R. Mann Library
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853
607 255-4608
jc55@cornell.edu

CASRAI contact:
David Baker
Executive Director, CASRAI
200 - 440 Laurier Ave. W
Ottawa ON  K1R7X6
Desk: 613-832-0304
dbaker@casrai.org  

Call for Papers

We are pleased to invite you to participate in this year's VIVO conference with contributions to the meeting. We request papers, panels and poster presentations exploring the many aspects of the world research community's vision for VIVO.

Submissions:  All submissions are handled electronically at EasyChair. For information on submission requirements, refer to the Official Call for Papers. Abstracts are due May 30.

Topics of interest:

• Facilitating researcher collaboration and networking
• Managing/discovering knowledge about researchers across institutional, disciplinary, and national boundaries
• Approaches to the adoption of VIVO and related systems that interoperate through shared ontologies and Linked Open Data
• The intersection of VIVO and international research standards
• Research representation ontology^! development
• Open representations of research and implications for the research process, collaboration, and virtual research communities
• Perspectives on policy, research representation, and research impact, including questions of privacy, individual vs. institutional sourcing of data, and change over time
• Semantic Web development and extensions of the VIVO platform to reach the full Web community
• Open research data and related issues in discovery, reuse, and attribution

Call for Apps

The conference is sponsoring a competition for applications using VIVO data to support science. Entries are due July 31. Refer to the Call for Applications for submission information, including eligibility, evaluation criteria and prizes.

Registration and additional conference information to follow.

About the Conference

The third annual VIVO conference runs from August 22 - 24, 2012 at the InterContinental in Miami, FL. This year's VIVO conference creates a unique opportunity for people from across the country and around the world to come together in the spirit of promoting scholarly collaboration and research discovery. Read more at the conference website, http://vivoweb.org/conference.

Save the date! The Third Annual VIVO Conference will be held August 22-24 in sunny Miami, Florida at the beautiful Hotel InterContinental.  The VIVO conference creates a unique opportunity for people from across the country and around the world to come together in the spirit of promoting scholarly collaboration and research discovery. The event will offer an outstanding slate of keynote speakers and invited talks, workshops, papers, panels, posters, and networking opportunities. Stay tuned for updates  and announcements on the conference web page, http://vivoweb.org/conference.

Call for Conference Workshops

We invite all interested parties to submit workshop proposals for the VIVO Conference.  In previous years, workshops were developed and presented by the VIVO team.  This year we would like to open up the workshop presentation opportunities to the broader VIVO community.

One-page proposals are due March 23 and the workshops will be taught onthe first day of the conference, August 22. The deadline to submit a workshop proposal is March 23, at 5:00pm ET. Decisions will be announced via email by Friday, March 30. For more information, please download the Call for Workshop Proposals on the 2012 VIVO Conference website at http://vivoweb.org/conference. Please forward this message to colleagues who may be interested.

Potential workshop topics:

• Introduction to VIVO, research discovery, and the semantic web^!
• Implementation and adoption of VIVO
• Theory and practice of working with the VIVO Ontology
• Building applications that use VIVO-compliant data
• Visualization
• Harvester and data ingest
• Researcher collaboration and networking
• Managing and discovering knowledge about researchers across institutional boundaries
• The intersection of VIVO and international research standards
• Researcher workflows and open research representations
• Institutional perspectives on policy and research representation
• Development and extensions of the VIVO platform
• or feel free to propose a topic not listed above

About VIVO

VIVO is an open source^!, open ontology^!, open process platform for hosting information about scientists’ interests, activities and accomplishments. VIVO supports open development and integration of science through simple, standard semantic web technologies. Learn more at vivoweb.org.