New Friends: The 2011 VIVO Hackathon
The 2011 VIVO Hackathon was held Wednesday May 4, 2011 through Saturday May 7, 2011. See 2011 VIVO Hackathon for team photo, links to related projects, the Hackathon chat pad, and descriptions of the resulting concepts and projects. 15 developers from around the world including 5 VIVO team members – Brian Caruso and Rebecca Younes of Cornell, Chintan Tank of Indiana and Nicholas Skaggs and Steven Williams of Florida, met at worked at the Health Science Center Library on the campus of the University of Florida.
They self-organized and self-identified projects of interest. I attended the opening and closing sessions and had some great conversations. There was incredible energy and enthusiasm during the event – for the promise of the semantic web, the reality of VIVO and the opportunities for creating new capabilities.
The enthusiasm was displayed on Twitter. Kristi reports: “Some stats from Twitter about the recent hackathon can be seen at http://t.co/2biHw6o. Tweets about #vivohack11 have reached 1,214 people and the tweets were a lot of fun to read! Really great, positive comments. 
Good job, UF Hackathon team! You can read the tweets at http://twitter.com/#\!/search?q=%23vivohack11 "
The five groups generated many more than five ideas and many more than five prototypes and capabilities. Much of the work requires follow-up and the group has considered how they collaborate going forward.
A special thanks to Kaitlin Blackburn and the event planning committee who managed all the logistics for the event. Kaitlin did a great job making sure that everything ran smoothly – travel, accommodations, food, AV, publicity, security, network access and many more details all went smoothly, contributing to a great atmosphere. And thanks to Cecilia Botero and the HSCL library staff who volunteered their wonderful space.
We will certainly consider how to sustain this event and plan a time and place for next year!
Wiki content on the rise
We are getting quite a bit of content in the Source Forge wiki. See [Special__Statistics] for page counts, popular pages, and more.
All issues of VIVO Notes are now on Source Forge. Search for “VIVO Notes” or click on Categories and select “VIVO Notes.”
There are many more pages to come. Please consider becoming a contributor – authoring new pages, revising and updating content, spending time with organizing pages into categories, improving the formatting of pages and editing. VIVO needs contributors.
From http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Editing_pages
“The number one rule of wiki editing, is to be bold. Dive in and make changes. Other people can correct mistakes later, so have confidence, and give it a try! There can be all kinds of editing conventions, rules, and philosophy governing the editing of wiki pages, but the "be bold" rule overrides these!”
If you see something that you can improve, improve it!
A Note on Wiki Formatting
Wiki formatting is very simple, and particularly simple if you stick to the basics. See http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Formatting. Look at other pages to see how those pages were formatted (just click on Edit, but don’t change anything – you’ll see the wiki mark-up that was used on the page. Most pages use very simple formatting. Keep it simple!
QR Codes are coming to VIVO
The development team has implemented QR codes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_code) for VIVO. This feature is currently in test. With a QR code on a profile, a reader can scan the QR code off the screen using a mobile phone (I use Qrafter on my iPhone) and the app makes a contact complete with photo. QR codes can be put on publications and other VIVO pages to make it easier for readers to connect to VIVO content. We will have more on this feature as it goes into a production patch. 
Sample VIVO QR Code. Ready to scan.
MODS
The development team is nearing completion on a VIVO feature for adding MODS format publications to VIVO profiles. The Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS, see http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/) is a Library of Congress standard for representing citations. Many of the most popular end user citations management tools including RefWorks, EndNote, Zotero, and bibtex provide for MODS output. We will add a button to VIVO that allows an end use to upload their own MODS database to VIVO and add the publications to their profile. For faculty who manage their citations in any of these tools, this will provide a one button solution to having their publication list on their VIVO profile.
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 01:54, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
