VIVO Workshop at TIB Hannover. “Why should we use VIVO as a current research information system?” was the question asked by Lambert Heller, Head of the Open Science Lab of the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB), at the start of the first VIVO workshop held in German. Speakers presented their work on VIVO, and interfaces between VIVO and other systems, and how VIVO can be further developed for use at German universities and research institutes. The VIVO workshop held at TIB Hannover on September 9 drew sixty attendees. Report available here
Representing Academic Degrees in VIVO. In case you missed it, there was a very active discussion regarding the representation of academic degrees in VIVO on the dev-all lists this week. Types of degrees, abbreviations for degrees, awards associated with degrees, local variations in the names of degrees, international degrees, extensions and local practices were discussed. Jon Corson-Rikert updated the Ontology Relationship Diagrams: Educational Training to clarify some of the issues discussed and to show how awards pertaining to degrees (typically honors of various kinds) might be associated with degrees.
Maven for VIVO. Graham and I would like to consider the use of Maven in future releases of VIVO. Maven is a popular Java build tool that integrates with IDEs and simplifies the effort needed to create a development environment for VIVO coding, testing and deployment. Maven also simplifies and modernizes dependency management and provides additional opportunities for improving the three tier build process. Please comment on a proposal for using Maven here.
Community Pages updated. The community pages in the VIVO wiki have been updated. See the the blog post for a summary of the resources available, and visit the Community Pages in the wiki for much more on resources available for community building. Have additional resources? Feel free to add them to the wiki. The Outreach and Engagement Interest Group meets regularly to discuss community issues. Please consider joining one of their calls.
Learning SPARQL book club. The book Learning Sparql by Bob DuCharme is a great resource for learning SPARQL or brushing up on your SPARQL skills. Paul Friedman of Northwestern University reports a Learning SPARQL book club has been started by the folks at Vanderbilt University Library. Most everyone who attended was fairly new to SPARQL and last week was the first time we all met. One person presented most of Chapter One and there was lively discussion throughout. For anyone interested, we meet in a Google Hangout (https://goo.gl/iL8hcC) on Mondays at 12p US Central time.
Go VIVO!
Mike
Mike Conlon
VIVO Project Director
