A personal thank you to Jim Blake. Since the time of the NIH grant, Jim Blake at Cornell University has organized technical development of VIVO and Vitro, developed and shepherded testing and release processes, contributed an extraordinary amount of documentation, presented at various VIVO conferences and other events, and served the VIVO community with uncommon grace, clarity, and distinction. When I joined the project in March of this year, Jim was very generous with his time and his thoughts about how VIVO might develop in the future and has volunteered and served with distinction on numerous VIVO task forces. Over the past fifteen months, Jim has been supported by the VIVO Project and has done much of the development in recent releases. Jim's term with the VIVO Project as a contractor ends this week and I want to take this opportunity to personally thank him for all his many, many contributions over the years. Please join me in thanking Jim for all he has done for VIVO and the VIVO community. We certainly hope Jim will continue to contribute his effort and wisdom to the project in the years ahead.
vivo2notld. Justin Littman of George Washington University has developed an interesting utility for exporting VIVO data in JSON and other formats. See https://github.com/gwu-libraries/vivo2notld The software is delivered in both command line and web app versions. Using vivo2notld, it becomes straightforward to provide data to other tools and applications that expect to receive data in JSON and other popular formats. This idea is at the core of the VIVO Roadmap Task Force recommendation to improve "data out" for VIVO. In future releases, we expect VIVO to have expanded APIs for requesting and receiving standard data in standard formats. Justin's work is more than a proof of concept. We might consider this a foreshadowing of "VIVO Server" – using VIVO as an extensible linked data datastore than can be used to support a wide variety of different applications through just this kind of simple, standard request with a simple, standard response.
Semantic Versioning. I'd like to start a conversation around a proposal to use Semantic Versioning for future releases of VIVO. Semantic versioning defines major, minor and patch version numbers, and does so in a way that appears to be appropriate for VIVO, well defined, and well, its semantic. Please take a look at a one page proposal for using Semantic Versioning with VIVO. You can leave comments on the Google Doc, or send an email to Mike Conlon with your thoughts.
Teaching figure added to wiki. An additional relationship diagram has been added to the VIVO wiki to depict the entities and predicates involved in representing teaching in VIVO. See Ontology Relationship Diagrams: Teaching. The diagram shows the relationship between the TeacherRole, Person and Course. Using the diagram, one can develop SPARQL queries regarding teaching, as well as develop Karma, Harvester and other ingest processes for maintaining teaching data in VIVO.
Graham on Imp Dev Oct 1. Graham Triggs will be on the Implementation and Development Work Group Call this Thursday at 1 PM US Eastern Time. Please plan to join Graham and feel free to ask any question you may have of the new VIVO Technical Lead. See the Implementation Calls for call information.
Go VIVO!
Mike
Mike Conlon
VIVO Project Director
