Hot Topics: The DuraSpace Community Webinar Series, VIVO 

Series Five: "VIVO: Research Discovery and Networking"

Curated by: Dean Krafft, Chief Technology Strategist at Cornell University Library & Chair of the VIVO-DuraSpace Incubator Project Management Committee

VIVO is an open community, an information model, and an open source semantic web application supporting the advancement of scholarship by integrating and sharing information about scholars, their activities and outputs at a single institution while supporting discovery of related work and expertise across a distributed multi-institutional network. VIVO supports descriptions of the full academic context of scholars and researchers in any discipline, and it makes explicit the connections of researchers and scholars to their grants, publications, courses, creative works, co-authors, datasets, performances, research instruments, projects, and much more.

VIVO is joining DuraSpace as the VIVO Project, via the DuraSpace incubation program, to realize our shared mission in support of research and scholarship through an established legal and financial framework compatible with VIVO’s own vision and goals. This webinar series will introduce VIVO and the VIVO community, provide views into VIVO implementations at three quite different institutions, and conclude with a more technical session describing the VIVO ontologies, linked open data, and the community processes supporting VIVO as a new project with DuraSpace. 

 Webinar 3: VIVO Technical Deep Dive

The third and final webinar will focus on technology and participation. We will look under the hood at the semantic technologies underlying VIVO, including the VIVO ontology and how the application architecture uses ontologies for configuration and extensibility.  We will explain how VIVO builds on other open source projects including Apache Jena and Apache Solr, describe a typical university-level installation, and discuss how to harvest and re-purpose VIVO data as Linked Open Data and as XML or JSON feeds to institutional websites. VIVO operates as a community organized around weekly or biweekly open ontology, implementation and development calls, with two significant annual face-to-face events that increasingly bring together a wider research networking community focused on open-source tools, internationally-driven standards efforts, and interoperability through linked open data. 

Presented by: Jim Blake, VIVO Release Manager, Cornell, Brian Lowe, Semantic Applications Programmer, Cornell, Jon Corson-Rikert, VIVO Development Lead, Cornell and Alex Viggio, VIVO Implementation Lead, University of Colorado, Boulder