Gudmundur Thorisson, University of Leicester; Geoffrey Bilder, CrossRef; Martin Fenner, Hannover Medical School

Project proposal

The overall aim of the proposed project is to understand how VIVO and ORCID could interact in the scholarly identity ecosystem. To this end, two main areas of work are planned. The first will focus on evaluating the VIVO project, the VIVO technology and its current/planned capabilities, with respect to the core ORCID mission and its technical requirements. Aims of this analysis include identifying overlaps and commonalities, and answering questions such as:

• Should ORCID use/extend the VIVO ontology for semantic interoperability?
• Could some VIVO software components be reused/extended by ORCID?
• How would a researcher interact with ORCID through his/her institutional VIVO installation?

The aim of the second area of planned work is for the ORCID Technical Working Group (TWG) to get hands-on experience with the VIVO software itself. This will be done by implementing several extensions to the VIVO platform to support a subset of important ORCID use cases, focusing on (but not limited to):

• Search for, retrieve and ingest bibliographical information from the CrossRef system4
• Secure, OAuth-based exchange of both public and non-public researcher profile information
  between VIVO and an external system (specifically, a manuscript tracking system)

Taken together, the outcomes of the project will at a minimum increase ORCID’s understanding of the VIVO technology, which should lower the barrier to future integration between ORCID and the increasing number of VIVO-enabled organizations. The implemented extensions will expand the overall functionality of the VIVO platform, thus benefitting the VIVO user community. Finally, of benefit to both VIVO and ORCID, this work may also pave the way for technology reuse and joint development, and more generally forge future collaboration between the two projects.

Results

Gudmundur Thorisson, 11/3/2011:

Couple of points relating to my demo on the dev call today:

The code is naturally on Github, along with some docs-in-the-making on the associated wiki.

If anybody wants to peek at this stuff, the main interesting bits are:

For those interested in this sort of thing, here's an excellent writeup on delegated vs. federated authentication

Note: swap out 'Twitter app' for 'ORCID app' in this article, and you've got an idea of the kind of role at least some of us envision the ORCID service playing with respect to connecting to other online services.

Finally, a draft of the ORCID phase I query API is available for public viewing. The API will support OAuth-based scenarios of the kind I demonstrated.

Regards,

Mummi