VIVO: a system for research discovery

In this paper the software VIVO is described. VIVO is a member-supported, enterprise open source software and an ontology for representing scholarship

A working prototype for vizualizing VIVO linked open data - toward a new VIVO LOD browser

VIVO intially shipped with flash vizualizations which were limited to viewing particular subsets of local VIVO data. Other similar profiling applicaitons have similar visualizations which have a limited range of data which can be view.<br><br>This working prototype will actively demonstrate web based javascript browsing of VIVO data. All VIVO data. VIVO data which can cross multiple web sites, domains, and institutions. The visualization utilizes standard VIVO jsonld renderings of individuals and classgroups which VIVO can deliver "out of the box", hence additional services like SPARQL endpoints are not required.<br><br>The talk will explore the funcationality required to view data properties and classes, display VIVO images, utilize various graph displays such as sunburts and radial graphs. What VIVO data should be displayed to an end user. It's important to show real meaningful information in a simple manner that's easy to digest. How and where should this be done? What was required by the javascript developer to accomodate the VIVO model? <br><br>The prototype is a work in progress. The source code will be freely available and can be used to vizualize data in any VIVO system

VIVO, Citations, and Alternative Facts

Too often one reads a web news article that might reference new academic research where the research isn’t even cited. Many times politicians clammer that the “data isn’t in” regarding topics like Climate Change. Other times one can reference a news media article and it actually utilizes data or research in a manner that is out of context. Academic institutions are beginning to leverage their stores of complex research metadata by exposing views into their knowledge management systems that can enable policy makers and journalists to find, reference, and connect with the subject matter experts at their institutions. A case in point is Brown University’s Rhode Island Innovative Policy Lab (riipl.org) project. Their mission statement states that “By developing a sophisticated suite of cutting-edge science and technology, we build and navigate complex databases, we design and test policy innovations to improve equity and opportunity.” As institutions provide more publicly accessible metadata, questions arise as to how the data will be used by end users like Journalists and Policy Makers. What are the needs to make the data more findable, properly formatted, and persistent. VIVO is positioned to be a platform of choice for disseminating academic institutional metadata for news information media and public policy maker consumption. VIVO sites are open sourced, holding vast amounts of metadata of the collective works of subject matter experts in every discipline. VIVO stores and disseminates this data using well known vocabularies hence it minimizes issues of ambiguity such as is found doing simple Google searches. VIVO is extensible such that domain specific metadata can be added to any VIVO site. Using these vocabularies any and all VIVO sites can be crosswalked and connected to provide a view into real peer review academic research that provides the most “factual” representation of a subject that is possible. This panel will discuss the needs, uses, issues, and promise of VIVO to provide information and citations in this age where the idea of factual knowledge is being challenged

Integrating and Building on Elasticsearch and VIVO-ISF Data

Poster presentation at VIVO 2016 conference on integrating Elasticsearch with the University of Colorado Boulder's VIVO instance ("CU Experts"), and then leveraging this to build faceted search and capability mapping functionality

VIVO in a networked research ecosystem

One of the goals stated in the VIVO Strategic Plan 2015-2016 is to promote a more open and networked research ecosystem (Goal 2). As more systems become interconnected, the demand for systems integration and interoperability increases but the problems become more complex. <br><br>System of systems (SoS) refers to a set of operationally and managerially independent systems interacting with each other to provide capabilities which cannot be accomplished by any single system. SoS has its own characteristics and challenges, such as emergent behavior and evolutionary development. SoS principles and methods can be applied to the networked research ecosystem and can be helpful in identifying the pain points and opportunities as well as the requirements for future systems integration across VIVO instances and between VIVO and complementary platforms.<br><br>In this presentation we will summarize preliminary work that has been done in a System of Systems approach for a network of VIVOs; review the necessary architecture components; discuss the pros and cons of different integration styles and patterns; identify challenges and opportunities; and highlight some of the SoS level integration requirements for VIVO to function optimally in a networked research ecosystem. <br><br>

Crosswalking Research Vocabularies in VIVO.pptx

<p>Many VIVO sites use different vocabularies to indicate the research areas they are affiliated with. For example the biological sciences uses PubMed MeSH subject headings but the Physical sciences might use a controlled vocabulary from a commercial vendor like Clarivate’s Web of Science Keywords or FAST terms from the Library of Congress. This can lead to redundancy and confusion on a VIVO site that allows the end user to filter based on a vocabulary term. The same or similar terms might display multiple times. Generally an end user isn’t concerned with the originating vocabulary of the term. They just want to filter or center their experience on that term. An example is how one can draw an equivalence between the Mesh Term “Textile Industry” at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/68013783 and the same Agrovoc term visible at: http://oek1.fao.org/skosmos/agrovoc/en/page/?uri=http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/c_7696&clang=en </p><p>These both indicate “Textile Industry”. In VIVO the problem arises if one publication indicates the Mesh “Textile Industry” term while a different publication might indicate the Agrovoc “Textile Industry” term. VIVO now will show two “Textile Industry” concepts. </p><p>It gets more confounding as we search through the other vocabularies. Some sites like wikidata might have links to the term in various vocabularies, but not all. Looking at wikidata we have: </p><p>https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q28823 </p><p>This has links to other vocabulary synonyms for “Textile”, but no links to FAST, MeSH, LCSH, Fields of Research (FOR) , or others. </p><p>Hence challenges are presented for VIVO sites that ingest publications from various sources, either directly or via applications like Symplectic Elements. </p><br><p>Our VIVO site, experts.colorado.edu is now impacted by this problem. We have thousands of publications from various sources using different vocabularies for research terms. We would like to import these publications and their terms into our VIVO. As a University that serves many disciplines how do we standardize which terms we will use. At first glance it seems that the amount of manual curation to do this properly is daunting. </p><br><p>The question then becomes what are the use cases for using Research Areas and harmonizing the terms within a site or across multiple site. An obvious case would be a journalist searching an institution for experts within a certain subject area. The journalist might not know specifically what the subject area is so it’s important to provide a top level view of general subject areas and allow them to drill down. This also might imply that the vocabularies utilize a SKOs type broader/narrower implementation. In this case each of the broader and narrower terms also needs to be harmonized with other vocabularies. </p><br><p>Solving this problem is crucial, especially if one wants to traverse multiple machine readable VIVO sites to locate items that might share a similar research area. Potential solutions could be that a VIVO site imports a crosswalk list of same-as statements between different research vocabularies or they utilize a lookup service. </p><p>Other options include a federated vocabulary harmonizing service where all VIVOs register and have their taxonomies mined in order to be synced with a master service. Perhaps something similar to a distributed blockchain service. </p><p>One reason this might be preferable is because many if not most VIVO sites require some sort of autonomy regarding the use of terms and their associations with other objects. Hence it’s imperative that the VIVO application continues to offer this flexibility. </p><br><p>This workshop or panel will discuss and weigh the various options of modeling and displaying this data, in machine readable and html format, and align these options with the needs of the typical VIVO sites taking into account the governance mechanisms and uses cases for these various VIVO scenarios. This is a very broad topic hence discussion will be scoped to maintain an objective of having a VIVO site display research areas in a similar fashion as commercial sites like Amazon do. </p><div><br></div