2018-07-08 VIVO Updates

VIVO Site Registry  The VIVO Site registry is a list of all the known VIVO sites in the world.  I get asked all the time "Is there a list of VIVO sites?"  Well, yes, there is.  You can find the site registry here:  http://bit.ly/vivo-sites

Is your site in the registry?  Hint:  you don't need to be in production, we think it's really cool to hear you have a site in development.  To add your site to the registry, click here:  http://registry.duraspace.org/register-repository

Association of Data, Information and Society, Nanjing China  I had the recent honor to be invited to give a talk on VIVO at the inaugural conference of the Association of Data, Information, and Society at Nanjing University in Nanjng, China.  You can find my slides here:  https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.6790694.

The association has a goal of increasing contact between information and data scholars in China with those in the rest of the world.  The conference had over 200 attendees and included talks by Gary Marchionini of the University of North Carolina, Ying Ding of Indiana University, Mark Musen of Stanford University, Jim Hendler of RPI, Dean Allemang of Working Ontologist (see below), Stefan Decker of RWTH Aachen University, Ahmed Abbis of the University of Virginia, and Barend Mons of Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Next year's conference is expected to be held in Wuhan China, and will be chaired by Mark Musen of Stanford University.

VIVO Books  From time to time, I'll pass along books I have found to be useful in thinking about VIVO and learning more about its information underpinnings.  If you work with VIVO and want to understand more about its information system and its representation of scholarship as linked open data, you won't do better than "The Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist" by Jim Hendler (two-time VIVO conference keynote speaker) and Dean Allemang, whose consulting company is called "Working Ontologist".  Jim and Dean clearly describe the semantic web, linked data, and ontology.  For anyone with a background in data representation, and  particularly for anyone who has wondered if relational tables are the only way, this book shows how connected graphs of data work, why they are important, and how, through ontology, they provide the best mechanisms yet found for sharing data.  Unlike other information representation systems, linked data includes its semantics, allowing deep processing by machines, and simplified processing and sharing for humans and machines.  If the semantic web or ontology seems complex, this book will help.  And once you've read it, you may find it difficult to understand how other information representation systems scale.  Extremely well-written and entertaining, with extensive examples and clear thinking, its hard to imagine a better introduction to the way the semantic web represents information.  I can't recommend this book highly enough.  Should be required reading for all of us creating open data for scholarship, and all of us working on VIVO.