Sara Russell Gonzalez (presenter)
Medha Devare, Mike Conlon, VIVO Collaboration
ALA June 2010
VIVO Collaboration:
Cornell University: Dean Krafft (Cornell PI), Manolo Bevia, Jim Blake, Nick Cappadona, Brian Caruso, Jon Corson-Rikert,
Elly Cramer, Medha Devare, Elizabeth Hines, Huda Khan, Brian Lowe, Joseph McEnerney, Holly Mistlebauer, Stella
Mitchell, Anup Sawant, Christopher Westling, Rebecca Younes. University of Florida: Mike Conlon (VIVO and UF PI),
Chris Barnes, Cecilia Botero, Kerry Britt, Erin Brooks, Amy Buhler, Ellie Bushhousen, Linda Butson, Chris Case, Christine
Cogar, Valrie Davis, Mary Edwards, Nita Ferree, George Hack, Chris Haines, Rae Jesano, Margeaux Johnson, Sara
Kreinest, Meghan Latorre, Yang Li, Paula Markes, Hannah Norton, Narayan Raum, Alexander Rockwell, Sara Russell
Gonzalez, Nancy Schaefer, Dale Scheppler, Nicholas Skaggs, Matthew Tedder, Michele R. Tennant, Alicia Turner, Stephen
Williams. Indiana University: Katy Borner (IU PI), Kavitha Chandrasekar, Bin Chen, Shanshan Chen, Jeni Coffey, Suresh
Deivasigamani, Ying Ding, Russell Duhon, Jon Dunn, Poornima Gopinath, Julie Hardesty, Brian Keese, Namrata Lele,
Micah Linnemeier, Nianli Ma, Robert H. McDonald, Asik Pradhan Gongaju, Mark Price, Yuyin Sun, Chintan Tank, Alan
Walsh, Brian Wheeler, Feng Wu, Angela Zoss. Ponce School of Medicine: Richard J. Noel, Jr. (Ponce PI), Ricardo Espada
Colon, Damaris Torres Cruz, Michael Vega Negrón. The Scripps Research Institute: Gerald Joyce (Scripps PI), Catherine
Dunn, Brant Kelley, Paula King, Angela Murrell, Barbara Noble, Cary Thomas, Michaeleen Trimarchi. Washington
University School of Medicine in St. Louis: Rakesh Nagarajan (WUSTL PI), Kristi L. Holmes, Caerie Houchins, George
Joseph, Sunita B. Koul, Leslie D. McIntosh. Weill Cornell Medical College: Curtis Cole (Weill PI), Paul Albert, Victor
Brodsky, Mark Bronnimann, Adam Cheriff, Oscar Cruz, Dan Dickinson, Richard Hu, Chris Huang, Itay Klaz, Kenneth Lee,
Peter Michelini, Grace Migliorisi, John Ruffing, Jason Specland, Tru Tran, Vinay Varughese, Virgil Wong.
This project is funded by the National Institutes of Health, U24 RR029822, "VIVO: Enabling National Networking of
Scientists".
Current Challenges
Libraries
• Researchers increasingly use online resources—Rarely visit the physical library
• How to stay involved with the research process—for collection building and designing
new services
Researchers
• Research is becoming highly interdisciplinary
• How can researchers find collaborators, track competitors, and stay abreast of current
research inside large institutions, at other institutions, and globally?
Administrators
• Research institutions can be extremely large
• How can administrators showcase and monitor research activity and understand the
strengths and weaknesses in an organization.
VIVO is:
What is VIVO?
An open-source semantic web
application that enables the discovery
of research and scholarship across
disciplines in an institution.
Populated with detailed profiles of
faculty and researchers; displaying
items such as publications, teaching,
service, and professional affiliations.
A powerful search functionality for
locating people and information
within or across institutions.
Who can use VIVO?
Faculty/Scholar/Researcher/Scientist
• Find collaborators
• Track competitors
• Keep abreast of new work
• Rely on customizable profiles maintained
via automatic updates
Donor/ Funding Agency
Student
• Discover current funded projects
• Search for specialized expertise
• Visualize research activity within an
institution
• Locate mentors, advisors, or
collaborators
• Locate events, seminars, courses,
programs, facilities
• Showcase own research
Administrator
• Showcase college, program,
departmental activities
• Identify areas of institutional strength
• Manage data in one place
…and many more!
VIVO origins and current status
• Originally developed at Cornell University in 2004 to support Life Sciences
• Reimplemented using RDF, OWL, Jena and SPARQL in 2007
• Now covers all faculty, researchers and disciplines at Cornell
• Implemented at University of Florida in 2007
In September 2009, seven
institutions received
$12.2 million in funding
from the National Center
for Research Resources of
the NIH to to enable
National Networking
with VIVO
A Library-based Support Model
Libraries:
•
•
•
•
Are a trusted, neutral entity
Have a tradition of service and support
Strive to serve all missions of the institution
Are technology centers and have IT and data expertise
Librarians:
• Have skills—information organization, instruction, usability,
subject expertise
• Have close relationships with their clients (buy in)
• Understand user needs
• Understand the importance of collaboration and know how
to bring people together
• Have knowledge of institution, research, education, clinical
landscape
Searching VIVO
VIVO Profiles
Repurposing data
http://research.cals.cornell.edu
https://confluence.cornell.edu/display/collaborate/
http://cals-experts.mannlib.cornell.edu/
http://gradeducation.lifesciences.cornell.edu/
Data, Data, Data
VIVO harvests much of its data automatically
from verified sources
•
•
Reducing the need for manual input of data.
Centralizing information and providing an
integrated source of data at an institutional level.
Internal data
sources
External data
sources
Individuals may also edit and customize their
profiles to suit their professional needs.
From local to national
National
browse
search
share
as RDF
visualize
Exemplar
Local
nat’l
sources
>
data ingest
to RDF
>
VIVO
(RDF)
>
local
sources
search
browse
visualize
interactive
input
>
share
as RDF
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Cornell University
University of Florida
Indiana University
Ponce School of Medicine
The Scripps Research Institute
Washington University, St. Louis
Weill Cornell Medical College
Data in VIVO: Semantic Web standards
Subject
Predicate (verb)
Object
Riha, Susan
research area
crop management
Riha, Susan
international geographic focus
Brazil
Riha, Susan
submitter of impact statement
Climate change and its impact on the distribution of invasive weeds
Riha, Susan
selected publication (authorship)
Biomass, harvestable area, and forest structure estimated from commercial timber inventories
and remotely sensed imagery in southern Amazonia
 Stored in Resource Description Framework (RDF) triples
 Uses the shared VIVO Core Ontology to describe people,
organizations, activities, publications, events, interests, grants,
and other relationships
 Incorporates Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) and Bibliographic
Ontology (BIBO)
 Supports local ontology extensions for institution-specific
needs
Storing Data in VIVO
has
author
author of
Mining the record: Historical evidence for…
author of
taught by
Susan Riha
academic staff
in
academic staff
crop management
research area for
headed by
CSS 4830
faculty appointment in
features
person
research area
research area for
has
author
research area
teaches
featured in
Andrew McDonald
NYS WRI
head of
faculty members
Earth and Atmospheric
Sciences
Cornell’s supercomputers crunch weather data to help farmers
manage chemicals
VIVO enables authoritative data about
researchers to join the Linked Data cloud
Tim Berners-Lee, http://www.w3.org/2009/Talks/0204-ted-tbl
Linked Data principles (Tim Berners-Lee)
 Use URIs as names for things
 Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those
names
 When someone looks up a URI, provide useful
information, using standards (RDF, SPARQL)
 Include links to other URIs so that people can
discover more things
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html
http://linkeddata.org
Mike Conlon’s VIVO profile
Mike Conlon’s VIVO profile as Linked Data
Challenges in the semantic approach






Granularity levels
Terminologies
Scalability
Disambiguation
Provenance
VIVO approach
Temporality
 Make it easy to enter structured data
 Address trust via authoritative sources
 Address privacy via focus on public
data
Jim Hendler, 1997 or 1998, http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~hendler/LittleSemanticsWeb.html
What’s ahead?
Future versions of VIVO will:
Generate CVs and biosketches for
faculty reporting or grant proposals.
Incorporate external data sources for
publications and affiliations.
Display visualizations of complex
research networks and relationships.
Link data to external applications and
web pages.
Get involved with VIVO (www.vivoweb.org)
 As an:
 adopter,
 data provider, or
 application developer
Thank you!
Questions?