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VIVO is not just people profiles. Try a search for 'ontology' in ontology in our tour example and you'll see results about people, events, organizations, installations, and research. Each distinct type of entity represented in VIVO has its own attributes and relationships to others of itself or of other types, sometimes directly or sometimes through intermediate connections indicating roles or a time frame for the relationship. VIVO has to be able to change as people take on new projects, are promoted, or move to a different department or institution.
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On most websites, the only way to find related items is to search for them and hope they share common terminology. That works in VIVO too, as in searching for ' Pennsylvania', but notice when you click on any of the results, such as 'full public production', you'll see links to other pages, including the University of Pennsylvania VIVO, that ensure relationships are pointed out and can be navigated in both directionson the right, there are "facets" – the search results have been organized into collections based on the kinds of things being returned – people, locations, research, organizations.
Many users arrive at websites not by typing the URL but from a search engine that delivers them to any arbitrary page in the website having the keyword or content they searched. VIVO provides explicit connections to related items to help users understand context and minimize their need to immediately conduct another search.
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