Recent development updates

The VIVO Scholar demo is live at https://vivo-scholars-scholars.cloud.duke.edu/. The site is public but development is ongoing.  We'll deploy new features at the end of every three-week sprint.

Get in touch on the #vivo-scholar Slack channel.

April 2020

4/23: In Sprint 17, from 3/30 to 4/17, we planned to finalize a number of search features. But we learned that they were trickier than we anticipated. Sprint 17 included the following tasks:

  • Cleanup of search features, part 1 (we haven't finished yet)
  • Substantial progress on responsiveness/the mobile UI
  • Sprint 19 added and beta release date planned for June 1

Watch the short demo video here.

March 2020

3/26:  Sprint 16 ends with the following additions:

  • Search page, Funding tab
  • Pages for individual grants, publications, and keywords
  • Pageable facets
  • Date slider + year resolution facet filters

Big note: final styling is still not complete.

February 2020

2/28: Sprint 14 ended on February 14, and Sprint 15 ran through early March with these updates (watch the video):

  • Search mockups and a functional spec
  • Search page, People tab, including facets for types, departments, and schools (research areas will go away)
  • Search page, Publications tab and facets for type, date (will be a slider), author, and publisher

Big note: final styling is in progress (it will look different soon).

January 2020

1/29: We wrapped up Sprint 13 with these updates:

  • Added grants data to Research & Expertise
  • Added the Teaching & Mentoring tab, with courses data and Teaching Overview data (here's a sample profile)
  • Road-tested the web components by asking the new Duke development intern, Kristi Turner, to make the above changes. Kristi is a fairly-new programmer with some web knowledge but had no problem making changes.
  • Simplified the GraphQL endpoint.  Try the endpoint with these sample GraphQL queries.
  • Watch our short demo video.

1/8: The VIVO Scholar Town Hall meeting happened today (watch the video here) and we gave updates for Sprint 12:

  • Added a Research and Expertise tab including Keywords in the sidebar
  • Minor improvements to the GraphQL endpoint and new sample queries
  • Switching Search from React to web components

December 2019

12/20: Here's what's new in December (here's our super-short demo video for Sprint 11, which ended on December 6):

  • Added a Publications tab to the profile with a sort button (note that the publication "entity" page is not finished)
  • Installed a VIVO test site for loading sample data and fake faculty
  • Hooked up the VIVO test site to the VIVO Scholar demo, which is no longer displaying OpenVIVO data but instead, sample data for VIVO Scholar development purposes
  • Developers, check out the GraphQL playground here: https://scholars-discovery-scholars.cloud.duke.edu/gui to query the new test data.

Stay tuned for more info about querying sample data with GraphQL.

November 2019

11/26: We've added the following new features to the VIVO Scholar demo (watch the demo video here):

  • Home page is mostly complete (you can change the background photo)
  • Profile page: the About tab is mostly done (except for organizations)
  • Demo data is coming from OpenVIVO for now, but sample data is coming soon
  • The Search results are not complete; this will be developed in early 2020

11/4: We've revised our milestones (hey, it's software!) and are planning to release according to the following schedule:

  • End of November: an early demo version with only the home page and a profile page with position and contact information
  • End of December: adding the Research and Expertise tab
  • End of February: adding the faceted Search
  • Mid-April: beta version ready

October 2019

Duke developers attended a conference about web components and plan to develop the scholars-react user interface using web components. Web components are customizable elements of a UI that can be reused and are platform-independent.

In the VIVO community sprint, VSTF developers enhanced the developer documentation of the three VIVO Scholar components:

  1. The scholars-discovery module pulls data from a VIVO database to populate a SOLR search index. The data in the SOLR index in turn populates two APIs to enable systems consume the VIVO data. There's a REST-API and a GraphQL API.
  2. The scholars-angular user interface is the second component; it consumes data from the REST API. This is written in Angular and used by Scholars@TAMU.
  3. The scholars-react user interface is the third component of VIVO-Scholar and consumes data from GraphQL. This is an alternate UI written with React and Go.

These modules will give developers many options for displaying VIVO data, and provide web developers a friendly interface for using VIVO data in their own databases.

The VSTF is seeking new and existing VIVO implementations to help with testing and planning of VIVO Scholar implementation. For more information, contact Andrew Woods, Julia Trimmer,  Richard Outten or anyone on the VIVO Scholar Task Force.

September 2019

The VSTF showed an early-access version of VIVO Scholar at the 2019 VIVO conference. See the demo site here: https://vivo-scholars-scholars.cloud.duke.edu/

Here's an example page showing data imported from OpenVIVO: https://vivo-scholars-scholars.cloud.duke.edu/entities/person/orcid0000-0002-1304-8447

Developers, check out the GraphQL playground here: https://scholars-discovery-scholars.cloud.duke.edu/gui
with sample queries here: https://github.com/vivo-community/scholars-discovery/wiki/Sample-GraphQL-queries

Non-developers, VIVO Scholar will use web components to enable end users to embed data in web pages. Here's a demo (more instructions coming later): https://github.com/vivo-community/scholars-discovery/wiki/Web-Components-(Demo)

Town hall meetings

Join us for an open call every six weeks. We'll show recent development and talk about what's next. Town halls are held on Wednesdays at 10:00 EST on the following dates:

  • January 8, 2020
  • February 19, 2020
  • April 1, 2020
  • May 13, 2020

You can find videos and brief notes from past meetings on the VIVO Scholar town hall meeting notes page.

Town hall connection information

Explore our sprints on Github

VIVO Scholar works happens in Github in VIVO Community Projects. Follow along with our three-week sprints to see what we're working on.


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