VIVO: Enabling National Networking of Scientists

The VIVO project is creating an open, Semantic Web-based network of institutional ontology-driven databases to enable national discovery, networking, and collaboration via information sharing about researchers and their activities. The project has been funded by NIH to implement VIVO at the University of Florida, Cornell University, and Indiana University Bloomington together with four other partner institutions. Working with the Semantic Web/Linked Open Data community, the project will pilot the development of common ontologies, integration with institutional information sources and authentication, and national discovery and exploration of networks of researchers. Building on technology developed over the last five years at Cornell University, VIVO supports the flexible description and interrelation of people, organizations, activities, projects, publications, affiliations, and other entities and properties. VIVO itself is an open source Java application built on W3C Semantic Web standards, including RDF, OWL, and SPARQL. To create researcher profiles, VIVO draws on authoritative information from institutional databases, external data sources such as PubMed, and information provided directly by researchers themselves. While the NIH-funded project focuses on biomedical research, the current Cornell implementation of VIVO supports the full range of disciplines across the university, from music to mechanical engineering to management. There are many ways a person’s expertise may be discovered, through grants, presentations, courses and news releases, as well as through research statements or publications listed on their profile—resulting in the creation of implicit groups or networks of people based on a number of pre-identified, shared characteristics. In addition to formal authoritative information and relationships, VIVO can also support the creation of personal work groups and associated properties to represent the informal relationships evolving around collaboration.