VIVO Implementations

We recently took a look at the VIVO implementation at the seven original schools. We now have a number that are implementing VIVO beyond the original seven. Stay tuned for more news about that.
The table below shows our original seven and the number of “people” in each school’s VIVO. To count people, we added index counts for disjoint sets to avoid counting the “stubs” – people who are not at each of our institutions, but may have been added through ingest of data. The numbers below are clearly approximations – the ontologists would do a much better job of generating a reproducible, well-defined, discrete person head counts.

The total head count is 40,359. In October 2010 we had just over 25,000. Congratulations to all the implementers!

VIVO at AMIA TBI/CRI

The American Medical Informatics Association Joint Summit on Translational Bioinformatics and Clinical Research Informatics was held in San Francisco last week. VIVO team members had two panels and 5 posters. Additional talks, posters And panels by VIVO colleagues Griffin Weber of Harvard and Titus Schleyer of Pittsburgh emphasized the VIVO message of an open semantic-based researcher networking community.

Additional schools expressed interest in adopting VIVO immediately. University of Illinois Chicago mentioned VIVO on their poster regarding building researcher community.
Thanks to the VIVO panel members – Kristi Holmes, Ying Ding, Chris Barnes and Valerie Daley. We had great attendance and enthusiastic questioning. Thanks to Michele Tennant, Jennifer Lyon, Leslie McIntosh, Nick Skaggs, Stephen Williams and Cecilia Botero for panels, posters and constant contact discussions regarding VIVO.

Sustainability

We get a lot of questions regarding the sustainability of VIVO. I’d like to share a few thoughts about what I see as a very positive future for VIVO.

The 12.2M NIH VIVO project will end. It is an ARRA award. There are no continuations. We may have carry-over funds (unspent balance) to keep strategic activities continuing with this funding. As some of you may know, carry over is never guaranteed and with the reorganization of the NIH, one cannot be certain even of the NIH Institute or Center responsible for VIVO, let alone finances. I can say we have very strong support at the NIH and NIH is working on an internal implementation. I consider those very positive signs.

The VIVO conference is very likely to continue. We did well the first year and there is strong community interest for the second conference. This bodes well for subsequent conferences. The VIVO conference is a central gathering place for adoption, implementation, outreach, development and ontology.

Other VIVO events are likely to continue. We have strong interest in the Hackathon, Implementation Fest and VIVO workshop. Spread throughout the year, these events will provide regular focal points for building VIVO community.

VIVO adoption will clearly continue. We have schools with semantic web interests, international interest, federal agencies, CTSAs, Libraries and other communities promoting VIVO. Every announcement generates more interest.

As VIVO adoption goes, so goes VIVO. It is the job of every one of us to share our experience and our thoughts for the future. We have great software, a fantastic message and all of us working across our schools, our collaborators and the world.
We can write more grants. There are many opportunities in informatics, ontology, biomedicine, bioinformatics, and other disciplines for extending VIVO and capitalizing on VIVO’s semantic structure.

VIVO operations will continue. VIVO adopters are committing resources to VIVO’s role as an enterprise research discovery tool. Recall that the Cornell Mann Library made these commitments long before there was an NIH grant. Other institutions will finalize their post-grant operational plans this summer.

VIVO development will continue. The open source community efforts are well under way, expanding the collaborator and contributor pool and further broadening and deepening VIVO development. We continue to meet new collaborators each week.

VIVO outreach will continue. As VIVO becomes part of the institution, the institution creates the mechanisms for continued outreach and support. Some schools will have support from a local group, others at the enterprise level through libraries, health centers, research offices, CIOs and provost offices.

We are also in conversations with interested companies regarding contracted VIVO implementation and support – this is an attractive option in the biomedical community. We are also in conversations with open source foundations. While not strictly necessary, association with a foundation may provide some additional resources beyond institutional commitments and grants.
Our upcoming events help fuel adoption and sustainability. And the actions of each of our teams – development, outreach, implementation and ontology –improves VIVO and VIVO’s position to help create a national network f scientists.

Ideas for VIVO Notes?

Is there an idea that you would like to see developed in VIVO Notes? Do you have questions or concerns that might best be clarified here? Please drop me a note.
Mike Conlon