The eighth annual VIVO conference was held at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City. I arrived on Tuesday and settled into my AirBnB apartment, a fifth floor walk up.
Tuesday evening, we an opportunity to get the planning group together for dinner it was great fun.
On Wednesday, I participated in workshop regarding MARC records, and the work of catalogers to disambiguate authors. I hope through the exchanges at the workshop that people involved in cataloging have a better understanding of the needs of the VIVO community, and that we have a better understanding of the needs of the catalogers.
Lunch on Wednesday was a group that included Christian Hauschke from TIB, Hannover, and Violeta Ilik. We went into the street and ended up in the Cornell cafeteria.
Later in the day we had a meeting of the VIVO Leadership and Steering Groups.We discussed the strategic plan, membership, participation, the budget, and next year's conference. It was a very engaged meeting. We had outstanding participation, and many ideas regarding strengthening the project.
Wednesday night, David Wilcox and I had an opportunity to go to Radio City Music Hall, and see Dave Chapelle, and The Roots, woith Ice Cube. It was a great show.
Thursday was a very busy day. It started with an outstanding keynote presentation by Christina Pattuelli of the Pratt Institute regarding use of linked data in jazz historical archives. Huda Khan, John Fereira, and Violeta Ilik, and I presented on a Survey regarding non-traditional uses of VIVO. I presented regarding research graph.
Following the presentations I manage to get out into the street for Nathan's hot dog. At lunch we had a ontology interest group meeting. We were joined by Jim Hendler from the Tethered World Institute, at RPI.The conversation revolved around ontological change management. Jim made the point that we should be considering how to accommodate previous versions of the ontology rather than having upgrades that require our data to change. Dave Eichmann offered some approaches to being able to do this. The ontologists have discussed this idea. It seems difficult in some of the real situations.
The afternoon had more contributed presentations followed by the poster session. I thought the poster session was a great success much good work being presented in a wide variety of different areas having to do with VIVO implementation. I had two posters, one on the VIVO roadmap, and one on blockchain with Alex Garcia Castro. I had a chance to meet many people in the community and share ideas with them.
Thursday evening, the Duraspace people had a chance to get together. We had a nice dinner.
Terry Wheeler, Paul Albert the rest of the while Cornell team did an outstanding job making everyone feel at home. I am so grateful to them for hosting the conference. Alex Viggio, conference chair, did a great job involving everybody, building participation, and community around the conference. Violeta Ilik did an outstanding job as program chair arranging invited and keynote speakers. The conference was a bit larger than the conference in Denver.
With regrets I was unable to attend the conference on Friday. It was the first time I had missed any part of any VIVO conference. I caught a plane the next day early in the morning for Mountain View California to attend SciFoo.
