Contributed Software. Recently, the Contributed Software Task Force produced a report recommending approaches to improving the VIVO community's ability to make, distribute and use "contributed" software – software that augments VIVO in some way, but is not part of the VIVO core software distribution. Reports, visualizations, ingest software, open social gadgets and other software should be easier for us all to use. The report makes three overarching recommendations:
- Develop concrete, visible guidelines through identifying gaps in community processes to assist VIVO contributors (current and potential) with organizing and sustaining work.
- Update and promote the current catalog of contributed applications and tools
- Create a “VIVO labs” organization to facilitate co-development of new projects
The Steering Group has endorsed this report fully. Over the coming months, you will see the recommendations of the task force being implemented. The current catalog of contributed applications and tools can be found in the wiki here. The authors of the report will be on an upcoming Implementation and Development call discussing the report and answering questions you may have. The Steering Group also wants to recommend this report for its presentation – if you are interested in leading a task force and writing a report, this report would be an excellent model to follow. It is well-written, concise, clear, and organized in a manner that simplifies assessment of implementation.
Please take a look at the report and the catalog. If you know of software that should be in the catalog, or can update any entry in the catalog, please comment on the page, or go ahead and make the update.
Revised Authorship Diagram. In our efforts to continuously improve the wiki (and thanks to all who are commenting, revising, editing), this week, the authorship relationship diagram was revised. Several minor points were clarified, the dateTimeValue for publications was elaborated, and the presence of a vcard on a publication for the purpose of representing URL(s) – full text, alt-metrics, others – was added. Thanks to Jon Corson-Rikert for revising the diagram. These diagrams are created using an interesting piece of open source software "VUE" – Visual Understanding Environment, and available for download from Tufts University at http://vue.tufts.edu/. VUE is a very handy tool for drawing ontological relationship diagrams – most of the VIVO ontology diagrams are drawn using VUE.
VIVO and SciENcv. Congratulations to Melissa Haendel, Oregon Health & Science University and Dave Eichmann, University of Iowa for their recent supplemental award from the National Institutes of Health National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. The supplement to the OHSU Clinical and Translational Science Award will fund VIVO-ISF ontology development to align VIVO with SciENcv data schemas. SciENcv is a researcher profile system for all individuals who apply for, receive or are associated with research investments from US federal agencies. The supplement will also fund software development to enhance CTSAsearch, a large-scale effort to collect VIVO-compatible data provide a faceted search interface based on VIVO-ISF semantics. Together, the ontology work and the search work should provide a comprehensive search capability across NIH investigators.
Go VIVO!
Mike
Mike Conlon
VIVO Project Director
