Evolution of VIVO Software

Layne Johnson, VIVO Project Director, DuraSpace

VIVO History – started at Cornell in 2003. 2009-12 NIH funded VIVO ($12 million) to evolve.

Problems – Researchers struggle to identify collaborators, most information and data are highly distributed, difficult to access, reuse, & share and is not standardized for interop.

VIVO can facilitate collaborations and store disparate information stored inteh VIVO-ISF ontology.

What is VIVO? Open source, semantic web application enables management and discovery of research and scholarship across disciplines and institutions.

VIVO harvests data from authoritative sources thus reducing manual input and providing integrated data sources. Internal data from ERPs, external data from bibliographic sources, ejournals, patents, etc.

VIVO data stored as RDF.

Triple stores and linked open data: provide abiity to inference and reason; can be machine readable; links into the open data cloue; provide links into a wide variety of information sources from different interoperable ontologies; allow knowledge about research and researchers to be discovered.

VIVO supports search & exploration – by individual, type, relationship, combinations and facets.

One of the larger implementations is USDA VIVO. Another interesting one is Find an Expert at the University of Melbourne. Scholars@Duke. Mountain West Research Consortium has a cross consortium search. The Deep Carbon Observatory data portal uses VIVO.

Installed base of VIVO implementations has remained somewhat level.

VIVO Evolution: from grant-funding to open source. In 2012-13 VIVO partnered with DuraSpace, who provide infrastructure and leadership – legal, tax, marketing communication, leadership. Sustained through a community membership model. VIVO project director hired May 1.

Charter process – Jonathn Markow & Steering group. Based on DuraSpace model for consistency across products. Charter finalized in late July, 2014.

VIVO Governance: Leaderhip group, steering group, management team. Four working groups: Development & Implementation; Applications & Tools; VIVO-ISF Ontology; Community Engagement & Outreach (undergoing reconstitution).

Four levels of membership – $2.5k, $5k, $10k, $20k.

VIVO strategic planning: 14 member strategy group created from leadership, steering, management teams and external members. Met December 1 & 2. Did a survey to determine current state of 41 VIVO leaders. Got 20 respondents. VIVO’s 3 strategic themes: community, sustainability, technology. 5 top goals for each theme selected, each strategy group member got tovote for 3 goals per theme.

Community: increase productivity; develop more transparent governance; increase engaged contributors; maintain a current and dynamic web presence; develop goals for partnerships (ORCID, CRIS, CASRAI, W3C, SciEnCV, CRediT, etc.)

Sustainability: create welcoming community; develop clear value proposition; increase adoption; promote the value of membership.

Technology: Develop democratic code processes; clarify core architecture and processes; develop VIVO search; improve/increase core modularity; team-based development processes.