VIVO Camp We had a great camp at the UCSD Biomedical Library, meeting new friends from Arizona, UCSD, Notre Dame, and Clarivate. Instructors were Violeta Ilik, Paul Albert, Benjamin Gross, and myself, joined by Brian Lowe of Ontocale. We had perfect weather (the meeting was in San Diego, so perfect weather is expected, but always appreciated). The camp got down into data sourcing, use cases, information representation, ontology, SPARQL, and Karma, with hands-on VIVO, interface, configuration, and much more.
We're planning a fall camp,. Have questions about camp? thoughts about topics, locations, timing? vivo-community@googlegroups.com
VIVO Conference The VIVO Conference will be held June 6-8 at the JB Duke Hotel on the campus of Duke University. Join colleagues from around the world in presentations and discussions regarding the representation and presentation of information regarding scholarship. Register today! http://vivoconference.org
New VIVO site at McMaster University Congratulations to the team at McMaster University in Hamilton , Ontario, Canada on the launch of Experts (https://experts.mcmaster.ca/). Experts at McMaster provides information on more than 5,500 faculty, 71,000 academic articles and more than 19,000 conference papers. The site looks great!
From Wikipedia: McMaster University (commonly referred to as McMaster or Mac) is a public research university in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is on 121 hectares (300 acres) of land near the residential neighbourhoods of Ainslie Wood and Westdale, adjacent to the Royal Botanical Gardens.[5] It operates six academic faculties: the DeGroote School of Business, Engineering, Health Sciences, Humanities, Social Science, and Science. It is a member of the U15, a group of research-intensive universities in Canada.
New VIVO site at the University of Alabama, Birmingham Congratulations to the team at the University of Alabama, Birmingham in Birmingham, Alabama on the launch of Scholars@UAB. Scolars@UAB provides information on more than 4,600 faculty, 41,000 papers, and 9,500 grants. Another great looking site!
From Wikipedia: The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) is a public research university in Birmingham in the U.S. state of Alabama. Developed from an academic extension center established in 1936, the institution became a four-year campus in 1966 and a fully autonomous institution in 1969. Today, it is one of three institutions in the University of Alabama System and the only R1 research institution in the state.
Congratulations to two new VIVO sites!
More Action Planning As many of you may knowyou heard here last week, the VIVO Project held a significant strategy meeting on kicked off a year long "action planning" process March 1. The group identified five “action planning areas” — each is Five action planning areas — are tasked with developing goals, engaging the community, and executing their goals over the course of the coming year. One of the action planning areas is “Resources”. This should come as no surprise, and I hope for most it comes as a welcome relief. Now we will have an open process for discussing the evolution of the software.
The VIVO software has remained mostly unchanged for several years. There have been improvements in technical infrastructure, addressing bugs and performance issues, while simplifying the build process, and technical documentation has been developed. The coming release continues the recent approach of updating technical dependencies, while introducing the triple pattern fragments API, a significant new feature for semantic web developers looking to access VIVO data.
But over these years, VIVO sites have developed their own solutions to pressing needs not addressed by the project. The creativity, ingenuity and craftsmanship of these sites has been overwhelming — sites have built their own front-ends, their own means for optimizing the system, their own APIs, their own widgets and visualizations, their own internationalization improvements, local analytics systems, their own editing systems, and most have developed their own custom tools for gathering, and managing data.
Such independent action speaks to the basic validity of the underlying design and architecture of the system. It is possible to do all these things with the software provided by the project. But it shouldn’t be required. The software should do more of common value for the community. And the community should have the means to develop together, so that the improvements made by one site become improvements that can be used by all sites.
Progress is being made on working together. Since the beginning of the year we have new interest and new effort. The committers group is meeting regularly to establish best practices. The developers group is meeting regularly to write, commit, review, and merge code. The ontology group has developed a definitive version of the VIVO ontology in preparation for enhancements. A first open two week sprint will be held April 23-May 4 to ready the next release, while practicing our new ways of working together.
The product evolution effort has identified a pressing need — the aging and difficult presentation layer for VIVO. Combining several of the most often expressed needs (look and feel, use of modern technology, developer engagement, user experience, functionality, and response) the effort seeks to design and build an MVP front end for VIVO using VIVO data over the course of the year. The group will know if it has succeeded if the groups with custom front ends are able to migrate to the new front-end.
The resource action planners are considering how to strengthen the project by increasing the resources available to the project. Areas of interest include:
- Development. The project can always use more developers. Developers organize their work in issues, pull requests, and sprints. The first sprint of the year will occur April 23-May 4. We hope you are able to join. Sprint 2 is being planned for late May.
- Membership. Membership in Duraspace supporting VIVO provides financial resources required to hire facilitators, provide project infrastructures, support outreach activities, and whatever else the project may need to purchase. Please consider helping us raise the number of members supporting the project financially.
- Community volunteers. VIVO has an extraordinary group of volunteers. These folks organize the conference, plan and teach the camps, organize sprints, write documentation, answer questions on the lists, recruit new members, and much, much more. As an open source project, VIVO is wholly dependent on its volunteers to move things forward. Please consider how you might help the project by joining Slack, and asking how you might help. The Interest Groups also provide a natural way to become more familiar with the project.
- Other sources of support. VIVO holds events, participates in grant funding, has service providers, and emerging services. Each are resources and each provide opportunities for financial support of the project.
There is much that can be done to grow resources across a broad spectrum of activities. It is an exciting time and there are many questions. VIVO is an open community. Please ask questions and join efforts.
- To get involved with action planning. contact Julia Trimmer
- To get involved with resourcesresource action planning, contact Terrie Wheeler
- To get involved with development, contact Andrew Woods
And for any question you may have about anything related to the VIVO project, please post to Vivo-community@googlegroups.com or VIVO-tech@googlegroups.com
Go VIVO!
Mike
Mike Conlon
VIVO Project Director
mconlon@ufl.edu