| What do you think the value proposition is for VIVO? |
| Quality, curated, structured data vetted by institutions and researchers/scholars that can support attribution, contribution, and collaboration across diverse organizations and disciplines. |
| Partnership with journals, funders, and institutions, can support a more quality and fair research enterprise. |
| I don’t know. |
| Software platform designed for flexibility and integration of diverse types of data |
| Increased discoverability for the scholarly outputs and expertise of institution's faculty and researchers by providing search engine optimized web pages, engaging visualizations that summarize this information and encourage exploration, and innovative browsing and search capabilities in the web site. |
| Embracing and supporting Linked Open Data and the related network effect, to offer a viable open alternative to "closed platform" research tools like ResearchGate. |
| The Vitro software offers a basic ontology editor, content entry and editing facilities, public-facing web display, and linked data services in a single, open source platform suitable for rapid prototyping of new semantic applications, especially for developing or testing a new ontology by populating it with data and sharing with domain users for evaluation and testing |
| VIVO as a stand-alone packaged semantic web suite. E.g. VIVO eliminates (or at least reduces) the need to cobble together numerous independent tools when deploying semantic web technologies. |
| Enabler of cross-institutional research networking |
| VIVO provides a way for researchers to connect with each other, and each others “research” beyond institutional boundaries. It allows researchers/users to identify other researchers working in a particular domain or area of expertise and therefore make a connection that otherwise may have been difficult to find. |
| Focus on promotion of networking and discovery |
| To raise the quality of data related to the above, by making this information public and encouraging institutions to curate and identify best sources and systems of record. High quality data is valuable. |
| VIVO offers value as a tool for building networks of structured, semantic data within universities and other research-oriented organizations and connecting people and research across those organizations through search and direct harvesting or linking |
| Continual development and expansion of the product |
| Structured, linked open data |
| The ability to curate and link data about academic output and academic networks (ex. pubs, grants, mentorships) that do not normally exist anywhere else in an institution. |
| Ontology designed around roles and activities to anticipate and encourage a future where traditional publications and citation counts are not the only metrics of scholarship |
| VIVO provides a research networking platform using semantic web technology and an ontology that is shared by other platforms and tools, as well as a community of experienced, engaged members |
| Enabling re-use of this high quality data, such as data syndication of VIVO data on other institution web sites, in a variety of public and internal reports, etc. |
| The VIVO-ISF ontology offers a coherent set of classes and properties for relating people, organizations, and the activities of research in a way that captures relationships and roles over time and can be shared across institutions. The modular design of the VIVO-ISF ontology allows flexibility in focusing on one domain or adding new extensions to support additional disciplines or new domains |
| Expanding the VIVO community and customer base to further achieve product benefits and sharing of knowledge |
| Platform for coordinated management of academic information and interoperability of systems that consume that information |
| Immediate: up to date, Whole of university research profile presence (or doing what academia.edu/research gate thinks universities can't do!) |
| University research syndication (VIVO search) |
| Whole of University research capability discovery |
| The VIVO software, ontology, and community allow interested parties to build research discovery and profiling systems with a robust data model that is based on years of effort and research. |
| I won't express an opinion about this. I'd like to see what real VIVO users think. |
| Robust semantic ontologies |
| Machine-to-machine harvesting of research events (e.g., for SHARE) |
| Linked open data integration |
| Data visualization of research connections |
| VIVO, as an open source platform, allows organisations to relatively quickly deploy a sophisticated research profiling system. It is well suited to environments where there is no centralised source of research activity information (ie. for through the web data entry), or where development resources exist, to couple it to ingest pathways for sources of research activity data. |
| Extensive custiomisation and enhancement of vanilla VIVO is possible, though not at this point, without development resources. |
| The VIVO community does allow for shared benefit as a result of building on top of a common platform, however currently the code structure and niche nature of the development community means that the barrier to entry is probably higher to new developers than other platforms, eg. Drupal. |
| Eventually, there will be benefits that accrue from the federation of data across research profiling systems that expose data in an appropriate fashion, but this benefit has not been fully realised at this point. |
| The VIVO platform is well placed to take advantage of continuing developments in a variety of spheres, including but not limited to: open access (for both publications and research data), bibliometrics and altmetrics, ORCID, CrossRef and FundRef |
| VIVO is strongest as an enterprise product deployed at the institutional level - with well resourced project/support teams and a strong policy framework in place to mandate the implementation of the system. |
| Institutions install VIVO. They do this to provide a record of the work of their people. They want a record of the work of their people to 1) provide efficiencies to their faculty, staff and students. Efficiencies include a) finding each other, b) producing standard documents and data to reduce administrative burdens, c) help faculty, staff and students understand academic opportunities. 2) support new forms of scholarship – team science and network science, and new activities in scholarship – data sharing and data reasoning. All these benefits can increase through network effects. 3) increase the visibility of their work by making the data regarding their work available to others. These benefits can increase via network effects. 4) create a permanent archive, a history of the work of the institution. 5) support planning and evaluation. By recording the work of the institution, one can look over time and assess the impact of strategic decisions and investments, as well as assess productivity. 6) support reporting requirements. |
| VIVO offers an opportunity for a non-denominational, neutral networking platform for researchers. Therefore, enhancing collaboration is a key benefit. When you think about the fact that other popular researcher networks like Research Gate and Mendeley are also out there, I think the neutral nature of VIVO is a key differentiator (not owned by a company, community driven, not for profit). However, we need to keep in mind that VIVO is competing with these other tools. |
| Allows institutions to create and maintain researcher profiles using authoritative data |
| Value in linked data. Non-proprietary solution. Open-source (collaborative). |
| What do you see as VIVO’s top goals in the next 2-3 years? |
| Data integration and standardization across multiple systems - Cerif, ORCID, ScienCV, Profiles, LOKI, etc. |
| Key partnerships with outside community |
| Having a closer partnership with each VIVO instance |
| Core – continue to improve modularity, with plug-and-play triple-stores and reasoners. |
| A stable community built and supported ontology. VIVO needs to build a larger and more stable ontology community that is in sync with downstream consumers of VIVO data. For example, Profiles RNS sites still exist emitting data in 1.4 ontology. What is the future of their data? |
| Make and easy to install, default configuration, application- reduce flexibility and increase simplicity |
| Increase the number of adopters worldwide, including lead institutions that can set an example for others and contribute to the project |
| Aligning each VIVO instance's extensions, data across the consortium, and its reuse in other applications |
| Quality ontology/standards management and development for a better integration into the software stack (or for other applications as well). |
| Core – lower the bar to entry with a binary distribution; no database, no Ant, no Tomcat, no Vagrant, just a Java runtime required. |
| More data out. The community needs to give more effort into producing ( or facilitating the production of ) secondary data sets that are useable by administrative folks (aka donors, funders) and academics alike. Dave Eichmann at IOWA is doing a great job of this using harvested VIVO data. |
| Expand the community to be more inclusive, democratic, and diversified so can start building a robust community source project |
| Outreach – convey usability, maturity, and coherence in all aspects of web presence. Crowdsourcing will not accomplish this. |
| More developers. VIVO needs more developers. VIVO needs to work on getting in tune with the preferred working methods of the cohort of probable developers in the communities that seem to be attracting themselves to VIVO. This may require surveying or reaching out to this group about this particular topic. |
| Clearer articulation of the value proposition to the academic community |
| More complete and accessible documentation |
| A software release process that's driven not by incremental improvements desired by existing users but by exciting and useful new features that can capture the imagination and energy of new adopters |
| Releasing VIVO Search or supporting a similar solution like DIRECT2Experts. |
| Transforming an informal network of committed individuals into a sustainable community offering transparent governance, the capability to deliver production-quality software and ontology, and an openness to new ideas and directions |
| Achieving performance optimisations |
| A key strength of the technology is the distribution (federation) of data ... this needs more attention in the beginning with stronger and more compelling demonstrations of that strength (this is particularly a problem when you don't know who is running VIVO) |
| Progress on VIVO search |
| Streamlined web presence; straightforward, timely communications that can be easily understood by prospective users or contributors |
| To develop a VIVO search tool, to expand our capabilities to support new VIVO implementations and to add/improve features like CVs, visualizations, embedded content and other cool "gadgets" |
| Providing input for use case driven evolution of the VIVO-ISF data standard. |
| Communicating where we are as a community, what we offer, and how we can partner with other organizations and movements to achieve goals such as shared identifiers and data interoperability |
| A more modular software structure where user developed functionality could more easily be plugged into the software build |
| Expanding the core services beyond the university faculty/staff information use case. |
| Increased open source commiter activity on the Vitro and VIVO projects, e.g. coordination of more code sprints and hackathons. |
| Increased adoption by universities and research institutions, e.g. having more than 100 active VIVO implementations in production. |
| Attracting new contributors (financial and in-kind) to the community by broadening VIVO’s reach in the sciences and biomedicine, in the humanities, and in libraries through closer integration with DuraSpace’s other communities supporting research data and repository technologies |
| Strengthen the open technical community and provide more training and "VIVO in the wild" showcases (e.g. it seems hard still to find out who is running instances at their institutions, which increases the difficulty of understanding who is doing what and who to ask to come out and play) |
| Increased adoption |
| Researcher personalisation: allowing some look and feel choice (citation style etc) |
| SEO (how to get as much traffic as an academia.edu/ research gate ) |
| Uptake: -> incease in new Universities using VIVO platforms |
| Getting VIVO search up and running |
| More contributions to both the software and ontology from community members who are using the platform to solve real information problems and deliver services |
| Clearer communication of community activities ( user documentation, software release schedule, working groups, etc) so that active members know where things are headed and potential members can learn about activities. |
| Clearer communication of VIVO's value proposition over other systems or data model in this space. |
| Encouraging the release and development of community developed tools and software to support VIVO implementations. |
| Develop a growing community of members who value VIVO and want to support it |
| Figure out how to best attract, fund, organize, and retain resources for getting work done |
| Improve communications, transparency, and participation |
| Make it easier for new institutions to implement VIVO |
| Create a thriving, diverse community of VIVO committers and contributors |
| Make community-based VIVO apps and tools discoverable, reusable, maintainable |
| Humanities and social sciences (HSS) ontology development |
| Grants management enhancements |
| Global adoption |
| Growing the user community and resources available for that community. The current scale of development and implementation is quite small. Though there are a number of high profile members, the scale if VIVO development and implementation must expand significantly if the product is to become a stable long term development platform for research profiling in the same way the fedora and dspace are standard solutions for repositories. |
| As part of the challenge outlined above - a specific set of tasks exist around modularising the codebase to allow for small targeted contributions of code and to facilitate the deployment and configuration of 3rd party modules that enhance base vivo functionality. Aligned with these activities is the facilitation of activites to allow VIVO to be deployed within a wide variety of software stack eg. use of alternate triple stores etc. (ie. more of a loosely coupled architecture) without harming the "easy to get started" experience for less technical users and institutions. |
| Increasing the discoverability of and display of information presented via VIVO, eg. search engine optimisation by enhancement of templates with mappings of information to schema.org (for search engines) and markup for social sharing on facebook and twitter. Decreasing the "bounce-rate" and short duration of visits to VIVO sites by automating the production of "sticky" content that users will engage with. (Better linking between entities in vivo sites, not just as a product of direct relations, but for "similar" content etc) |
| Maintaining the technical and feature advantage of VIVO over other platforms, particularly ones deployed outside of institutions, eg. academia.edu, researchgate, impact story, figshare and the like. All of these external platforms have compelling value propositions for individual academics and may impact on take up of VIVO at an institutional level. Effective integration with all of these external platforms may act to reduce the challenge they represent. |
| Better integration with content management systems from fedora (data management app development frameworks) to drupal (standard off the shelf content management) will prepare VIVO for a future of facilitating direct access to research data and related resources. |
| Finalising a solid draft of the VIVO-ISF ontology, developing mappings to other comon related otonlogies and driving the adoption of VIVO-ISF in other products will be instrumental in growing the develper base, tools and utilities around VIVO. Keeping third party sofware vendors along for the transition to this ontology (eg. Symplectic) will be key. Bringing other vendors to the table, eg. Elsevier Pure, etc will ensure that VIVO is a standard choice, rather than a difficult one for institutions looking to deploy a research profiling system. Future ontlology development will require better tool for migrating data and ingest pathways from one iteration of the ontology to another. Ensuring that existing VIVO installs have the documentation and support required to migrate to up-to-date versions of the platfrom/ontology will ensure that the landscape within the VIVO community does not become too fragmented. |
| Grow the installed base. This brings new people, ideas, resources to VIVO and creates a positive feedback loop. More effort, better product, more adoption, more effort. |
| To grow the installed base, we need to improve the value proposition. |
| Improve the value proposition for VIVO by reducing the effort required to create and maintain a VIVO. |
| Create apps that address the various purposes for VIVO above. |
| Federated search across VIVO sites. |
| Creating unique value to researchers and institutions in order to differentiate from other similar tools. |
| Improve performance the application |
Increase number of core contirbutors. |
Increase the modularity of the code. |
Improve documentation |
Improve the ease with which sites can import data into and export data out of VIVO. |
| Improved functionality – visualizations (to be competitive), faceted search (enticing to use) |
| Identify standards/structures of governance for work to be accomplished well while motivating many technical people to want to use VIVO and get involved. |
| Marketing/PR – Why VIVO is a great solution for academic institutions, clear identification of use cases, clearly id how it relates to other pieces in the field, what do you get from using VIVO (non-technical information) |
| Clarity of communication – easy for decision-makers to find info (not just for technical people) |
| Increase numbers involved |
| Better marketing and branding, not only of the product(s) but of the community's vision |
| Ingest – select (or develop) an entry-level ingest tool and thoroughly support its use with tutorials, examples, and workshops. |
| What do you think are the key issues and challenges for VIVO that need to addressed in the next 2-3 years? |
| No technical project manager tying things together and helping prioritize work, dependencies, etc. |
| Not enough boots on the ground to do the work. |
| The management structure is to complex and top heavy, there are too many WGs, steering committee meetings/levels. |
| Ontology developers must become user-oriented, and with an eye toward practical performance levels. |
| Lack of resources to do the work needed |
| Mobilizing resources / raising funds |
| A more transparent governance process |
| To solicit new leadership and find ways to get feedback from all of our member institutions. |
| Increased clarity on the Vitro project, i.e. will it be promoted to other user bases or remain focused as a tool for the current faculty/researcher user base? Should it be renamed to amplify the VIVO brand, e.g. VIVO Core? |
| Explaining what we do, why we do it, and how newcomers (and even some long-timers) can effectively participate, meet their own goals, and contribute going forward |
| Building confidence within our community that we can survive changes in personnel and even changes in partnerships as institutions, movements, and priorities change over time |
| Build trust in the user base that any new functionality will still align with VIVO's goals and core technical concepts |
| Reduce the barriers to entry to enable and demo the technology (this will probably come in the form of better demos and expanded coverage of the ingest use cases) |
| Complexity of implementation |
| Plans for collaboration outside of VIVO are fuzzy, yet key for adoption and success of the consortium- be it the app, the ontology, or the data. |
| There isn't enough PR or people to do it. |
| Governance must develop and impart some momentum to the project. |
| Lack of focus- trying to be too many things, without clear value proposition |
| Building positive energy about future possibilities; not letting these discussions get set aside or drowned out by current problems or issues |
| To grow our community and strengthen the options for providing help and support to members. |
| Best supporting backwards compatibility and data migration for older VIVO implementations as the VIVO-ISF ontology evolves. |
| Addressing performance issues in the application and its software dependencies. |
| Transitioning from reliance on a passive “build it and they will come” approach for data, ontology, and software to delivering coherent and robust tools and visualizations that show the significance of the data we have collectively gathered and how it can be applied to emerging information needs |
| Ensure the current VIVO user base upgrade to the recent version |
| Enforce standard code practices |
| Demonstrate more compelling integration use cases -- most institutions already have some form of the data being ingested, but it is not so clear how to quickly show the value add of VIVO with existing systems that may already have data but lack an understanding of its value in the VIVO context |
| Commercial profile solutions |
| Information sharing is not as accessible or transparent as it could be, and is too distributed, which diminishes PR and development process efficiency. |
| Governance must determine goals; developers are only qualified to determine methods toward those goals. |
| Exclusive community- needs to expand out of Cornell in effort and perception |
| Clearly identifying (and aggressively promoting) benefits to institutions who sign on to contribute financially as members |
| To avoid being fractured into too many initiatives and directions and to stick to our core missions. |
| Encouraging more VIVO implementers to share their extensions as open source. |
| Identifying or providing more linked open data sources for commonly referenced individuals such as institutions, journals, and concepts (ex. MeSH). |
| Establishing a evolving road map definition and evaluation process that reflects the best ideas in our community, makes those ideas more tangible, and points out where the biggest challenges remain |
| Ensure future upgrades are less prone to problems |
| Better improvements in key functions such as templating i.e which template renders what and gets included where? |
| Streamlining data ingest, improving user interface design/usability, cross-instance information sharing (e.g. cross-organization exchange of information about the same person, project, or topic) |
| Funding, sustainability |
| Move the whole VIVO community onto VIVO 1.7 (including SciVal and Research Profiles) : reduce technical debt. |
| Growth of Technical support community |
| Establishing clear communications (see above) so that community efforts can be as productive as possible. |
| Developing the software and ontology in an open manner with contributions from more community members. |
| Determining the community model for software development. Will VIVO continue to be primarily a single web application that aims to serve nearly all implementation needs (data display, editing, search, etc) or will the VIVO community become a group of solutions that can be deployed individually to solve related problems (like the Duraspace affiliated Hydra project). |
| Is Vitro something the community wants to push forward as a solution? There is great potential value in Vitro as a platform to develop Linked Open Data solutions, which there is a a great deal of interest in related communities. Should this become more of a prominent offering? How does it fit in? |
| There seems to be a tension expressed between those who value VIVO "ownership" of the VIVO-ISF ontology and those who want to engage non-VIVO-users in adoption of the ontology for other purposes. How do we resolve this? |
| It seems like there are significant problems upgrading to some new releases of VIVO. How do we deal with this in the short-term for current adopters and longer-term for future adopters? |
| The original Indiana visualization tools are not being maintained. What do we do about that? |
| Going beyond biomedical ontologies and taxonomies to be useful to everyone, no matter what their discipline |
| Becoming an integral part of the LOD ecosystem |
| Sustainable funding |
| Offers from commercial entities that might want to buy out the technology, rather than buy into it |
| The emergence of new players in research profiling external to institutions. Systems like researchgate, academia.edu and others could supplant the institutional drivers towards development and implementation of research profiling systems. |
| Leveraging internal semantic data to expose data in form best suited for consumption and syndication by external systems (schema.org, google scholar, google news, facebook open graph, json-ld, etc) |
| Developing a sustainable ecosystem of development around VIVO, including the adoption of the ontology in other products and platforms. |
| How do we identify the killer apps for VIVO? |
| How do we radically reduce the effort required to implement and maintain VIVO? |
| How do we create a value proposition so compelling that institutions will overcome the resistance of IT shops to learn something new? |
| How do we get from 100 installs to 200 to 500 to 1000? |
| Implementing a VIVO site to completion (it seems like many start but few finish). |
| Maintaining/updating data in a VIVO site. |
Few people understand how the VIVO application works. |
Sustainability (funding) |
