Sprint this week! VIVO will be holding a one week sprint to introduce new developers to the project. The print will focus on maintenance tasks. If you'd like to learn about VIVO, how it is developed, and pitch in, this is a great opportunity. You will want to be on VIVO Slack if you are not already. Details regarding the sprint are available here: 2018-12 Sprint
January Architectural Fly-in The VIVO Project is planning an invited architectural fly-in to develop architectural approaches to addressing the statement of direction for 2019. The fly-in will bring together technical leaders to create documents that can be used to organized development sprints moving us in our desired direction. The fly-in will meet at the University of Florida Academic Research Center in Lake Nona Florida, and will be facilitated by Andrew Woods. You can read more about the fly-in here 2019 Architectural Fly-in The results of the fly-in will help orient technical work for 2019.
David Wilcox joins Membership Task Force David Wilcox of Duraspace is joining the VIVO Membership Task Force. David is well known in the Fedora community as the Fedora project manager. David has significant experience building and maintaining Fedora project membership. The Membership Task Force looks forward to working with David over the course of the coming year in its efforts to strengthen and grow VIVO membership.
Please welcome David to the VIVO community!
Books for VIVO Each month, we consider a book of value to the VIVO community. This month the book is “Basic Formal Ontology” by Robert Arp, Barry Smith and Andrew Spear. Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) is a top level ontology that provides the framework for the VIVO ontology, and many other ontologies, particularly ontologies used in the natural sciences. BFO is rooted in the philosophical concept of realism. BFO tries to define things that exist in the natural world, and tries to avoid defining classes and properties of convenience. This approach leads naturally to creative tension with those who might take a more expedient approach — identifying elements that appear to have value and letting utility determine the value of the representation. Professor Barry Smith, the originator of BFO, has been called “the most famous philosopher in America.” His ideas can be controversial, but BFO forms the foundation for the Information Artifacts Ontology (also used by VIVO), the Gene Ontology, ontologies used in industry and government, and the Open Biomedical Ontology Foundry ontologies. If you would like to know more about the foundational roots of the VIVO ontology, and of ontology in general, you can’t do better that Arp, Smith, and Spear. The VIVO ontology is mentioned in the book, as are many other ontologies based on BFO.
Robert Arp, Barry Smith, and Andrew D. Spear. 2015. Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology. The MIT Press. ISBN-13 9780262527811.
Open Repositories Call for Proposals Open Open Repositories will be held in Hamburg Germany, June 10-13, 2019. The call for proposal is currently open and closes January 9, 2019. You can find the call for proposals here: https://or2019.blogs.uni-hamburg.de/cfp/
Giving a presentation or poster about VIVO? Know of an event of interest to the VIVO community? We'd love to hear from you! Please add the event to Conferences Attended and to Attend
Go VIVO!
Mike
Mike Conlon
VIVO Project Director
