Agenda
To save time, we'll skip our updates from participants today but will ask if anyone has any particular questions.
Mike Conlon, VIVO Project Director, would like to discuss feature planning for VIVO 1.9 with the group. VIVO 1.9 is planned as a “features release,” adding things that have long been talked about (and that some sites have built for themselves). The roadmap group has focused effort in four areas:
- Improving data ingest
- Improving performance
- Improving reuse of data
- Improving visualizations
We'll be using Duke's WebEx service, so use this link to join the WebEx meeting:
https://dukeuniversity.webex.com/dukeuniversity/j.php?MTID=mc24050703e3752f858391227209751f3
Meeting number: 738 650 423
Meeting password: VIVO
If you are unable to join the call, please send a message to the vivoweb.org contact form at http://vivoweb.org/support/user-feedback
Attendees:
Julia Trimmer, Duke University
Mike Conlon, VIVO Project Director
Julia Trimmer, Duke University
Suzanne Pilsk, Smithsonian Institute
Graham Triggs, VIVO Technical Lead
Alvin Hutchinson, Smithsonian Institute
Darrell Gunter, Gunter Group Consulting
Jon Corson-Reikert, Cornell University
Jim Blake, Cornell University
Justin Littman, George Washington University
Minutes
Mike Conlon led the discussion.
Let’s talk about expectations for VIVO, what it should do and what’s missing. VIVO 1.81 was released today and the visualizations work and look much better, it’s faster, and we now have Altmetrics displayed for publications! (Way to go, Graham Triggs!)
Mike related a story about someone complaining about VIVO being too slow and found it unusable. He hopes that 1.81 will take care of that complaint.
Julia mentioned a visualization like a force-directed graphs: http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/4062045 showing relationships between people working on a common subject.
Alvin said that the Smithsonian has not rolled out VIVO to everyone but they’ve had some feedback, mostly cosmetic. They ask to make it look better, move elements around the page. Make it more intuitive. Actionable DOI, so that the link is live to the publisher’s site, and the PubMed ID.
Alvin says that most people look at their own profiles where he thinks it would be most useful to search for topics to find out who’s using it. It’s not intended to be a LinkedIn for the Smithsonian staff but more of a research registry.
Mike explained that the data is often incorrect in upstream systems.
Jon wondered if VIVO needs more visual cues as a search tool or a visualization tool to emphasize the connectivity of the data.
Mike suggested that we could borrow from Profiles to show other kinds of networks – concept, geographic, etc
Darrell says he wishes LinkedIn could show connections between people in a much better way. He thinks folks are trying to understand who’s published in a topic area and how to communicate and collaborate with them. Linked in is very flat. He recommends being to show experts across the globe and give ways to connect with them publically and privately.
Mike says that people want to see connections between them, as in my social distance from a person. Can we think about how to build something like this? Would be useful for building teams, and collaborating, so that people could figure out “Who do I know that knows this other person?
A modular or standard way to re-use data on websites is also very important to the Alvin. Cornell has done that and we have discussed packaging up that functionality. We will be looking at ways to do that. This can be simple, like “Recent papers added to VIVO” which is a list of papers added to the VIVO during the past week.
Suzanne asked if there’s a way for the VIVO project members to be searched, and we explained that we did have a VIVO for community members but it became onerous to upgrade and support. Another request is the VIVO search tool across all VIVO instances, which both
Julia showed Duke’s list of enhancements, some of which involve Duke’s source systems. One of the top items is a CV/biosketch which Mike reports is a top request by many people. Duke also had a list of recent enhancements on their Support page. Sometimes local enhancements are items that should be added into VIVO.
Mike emphasized that he is ALWAYS receptive to ideas for enhancements to VIVO so please let him know if you have suggestions! We’ll get an update during next month’s call.
