VIVO Conference Registration is Open

Please take a few minutes this week to post an announcement of the VIVO conference to one or more of your professional email lists. Team member posting to lists is our most effective means for getting out the word about the conference. The meeting announcement is below, just cut and paste!

The Second Annual VIVO Conference will bring together scholars, scientists, researchers

More VIVO Conference

The second thing you can do is register. See you in DC!

VIVO Hackathon

The VIVO Hackathon is set for May 4-7 in Gainesville, Florida. Sixteen semantic web developers from around the world will be in attendance. The group will consider opportunities for developing VIVO software and using existing semantic web tools, technologies and data resources in furthering the development of VIVO and network tools based on VIVO. Several of the participants provided their own support – a strong indication of interest. We look forward to sustaining this event in the future.

VIVO Implementation Fest

The VIVO Implementation Fest is being planned for June 23-24 in St. Louis. We will be inviting institutions currently implementing VIVO to spend two days in hands on work in policy development and technical work. Look for more information here and through our blog and web site about the implementation fest. We hope to share experiences, develop best practices and encourage and support the growing number of schools implementing VIVO.

Technical and Policy Work

Preparing for the Implementation Fest has helped us clarify our thinking about what constitutes an implementation. It does appear that a VIVO implementation roughly breaks down into technical work and what we have chosen to call “policy” work. But both terms are broad and simplify a great deal.
Policy work starts with consideration of what kind of a VIVO implementation will one have? Is it a technical implementation that will not be used by the faculty – completely automated and provided without outreach and engagement? Will self-editing be promoted or hidden? How will policy questions be answered? Who will run the project? Who will be expected to own the application after the implementation is complete? Data sources must be identified – how many data sources will be used? Which are institutionally controlled? What is the role of the faculty in the implementation? How will outreach be handled? The ability to answer high level questions in a timely manner is critical to the success of a VIVO implementation. Policy work often involves institutional governance processes – layers of committees and decision makers. Understanding the structures and how decisions are made leads to the ability to have questions answered. The policy side of an implementation typically deals with costs – what resources will be available now and in the future for VIVO? Reasonable costs are specific to institutions and are related to the scope of the implementation – how much data will be loaded, how much entered by hand? How involved will faculty be? How large and complex is the institution? How well can decisions be made? How complete and what quality is the institution’s data? How well does the institution understand the nature of the work to be undertaken?

The technical work of VIVO appears to fall into three broad areas – system administration, data ingest and curation, and software development. In larger IT shops, these would naturally fall to different groups. In smaller IT groups, we might expect these work areas to belong to the same group. And in the extreme case, they might belong to just one person. System Administration involves setting up the environments for the VIVO software, applying security patches, dealing with network, storage, backup, monitoring and other concerns. System administrators are primarily concerned with “up time” and “response time.” Data curators make sure the data are complete and correct. They use manual editing, ingest tools such as the Harvester, and SPARQL queries and scripts to create and clean the data in VIVO. They understand the ontology and how and when it must be augmented. They map institutional data to VIVO structures and work with institutional providers on acquisition and curation. Software developers are concerned with the VIVO software – adding features, fixing bugs, improving its capabilities, flexibility, performance and architecture. Most implementing sites will not have developers – they should be able to install and maintain a VIVO system and its data without having to develop software.

Regardless of the size of the institution, or the nature of the implementation being considered, implementing VIVO will involve a team of policy/managerial people along with a mix of technical people. Creating a successful team – one which can work together to implement VIVO in a timely manner – will depend on clarity around the goal of the implementation, a clear vision of how the work will be accomplished both technically and with respect to policy, structure and a plan, and finally respect and enthusiasm for the work and for each other.

A week with VIVO

I had an unusual opportunity a few weeks ago to get away from my normal daily routine and spend a week with VIVO. I took a “vacation” – got out of the office, went off to a nice place, disconnected the phone and the email, and spent a week working with VIVO. I am keenly interested in using the VIVO data infrastructure to support a new class of applications. These new applications are not “part” of VIVO. They can be made by anyone, live anywhere on the net and consume VIVO data for the purpose of advancing research and scholarship. We are seeing a growing collection of such applications – Miles Worthington’s Faculty Search demo, the CTSA Federated Search tool at UF, the various web site enhancements at Cornell that rely on VIVO data, and the mini-grant work at Pittsburgh, Duke, Indiana, Weill, Stony Brook and ORCID all have the same approach – use VIVO data in applications beyond VIVO.

My own work focuses on discovering organizational structure and basic metrics related to structure. At last year’s conference we showed simple software for mining structural information from VIVO using the R software system. R (www.r-project.org) is a powerful open source statistical analysis and visualization software system. Libraries have been added to R for processing XML files. The RDF produced by VIVO is readily handled in R. Visualization of networks can also be handled by additional R libraries. Using these tools, I have built some basic tools for accessing, processing and displaying VIVO data that I will improve over the coming months. You can follow the work in the SourceForge wiki. See Getting started with R network representations.

I’m glad I had the opportunity to spend some time with VIVO. I believe I have a better appreciation for the semantic web, RDF, and the work all across the VIVO project in development, ontology, implementation and outreach.

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 presented here? Please drop me a note.
Mike Conlon 00:03, 25 April 2011 (UTC)