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Chris Barnes from the University of Florida is leading a new VIVO Apps & Tools working group highlighting showcasing existing tools via demos and discussions via biweekly callson biweekly calls, as well as addressing opportunities and requirements for new tools and applications beneficial to the VIVO community.
Performance improvements
VIVO draws the content displayed on a typical profile page from a very disaggregated structure represented internally as RDF statements, or triples. Hundreds or even thousands of RDF statements are dynamically assembled or 'rendered' into HTML for display of a page; the process naturally takes longer as the amount of information to display on the page increases.
Applications that generate pages from underlying databases can often take advantage of HTML caching – a technique to store a copy of the finished page to be served to the user instead of regenerating the page from scratch at every request. There are a number of standard HTML caching libraries that leverage the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) headers returned in response to an incoming browser request to permit an application to only regenerate a page when its content has changed. VIVO 1.6 has been modified to use a field in the Apache Solr search index that reflects when a page has last been edited as a trigger to regenerate the page; if the cached version of the page is still newer than the date and time of last update, the page stored by the caching library is returned immediately, reducing server load and speeding the response to the user. Note, however, that caching is disabled for a user whenever that user is logged in.
Mark Fallu from Griffith University and Ted Lawless from Brown each contributed to this new functionality.
VIVO's search indexing utility has also been extended to support re-indexing a specific subset of data known to have changed. If through data ingest or other modification a known set of individual entities has been updated, VIVO's search indexing can be given a list of URIs to index rather than having to re-index the entire database. This should allow more efficient processing of incremental updates to publications or other content in batch mode, especially when using the VIVO Harvester and writing directly to the VIVO database using the Apache Jena code libraries.
In other performance-related improvements, responses to linked data requests are faster and more concise, and include a link to the "terms of use" statement provided by the implementing institution.
Look and feel
VIVO keeps the same overall look and feel while sporting a new and more dynamic home page including rotating features highlighting individual research areas, researchers, and departments as well as more prominent statistics on key content elements. An optional map view highlighting the global, national, or regional geographic research focus may also be activated and all features may be customized to local preference.
And many more improvements
In addition to the above major features, VIVO 1.6 includes many new development and debugging features offering implementing sites additional control over deployment, access control, and customization of VIVO pages with additional queries and reports. VIVO's internal SPARQL query endpoint may be configured for authorized access and now supports HTTP content negotiation and JSON-LD.
For additional detail on these and other improvements, please review the full VIVO 1.6 Release Notes.