...
VIVO breaks data apart in chunks of information that belong together in much the same way that relational databases store information about different types of things in different tables. There's no right or wrong way to do it, but VIVO stores the person independently of the position and the deparment.
department – the position has information a person's title and their beginning and ending date, while the department will be connected to multiple people through their positions but also to grants, courses, and other information.
VIVO even stores a person's detailed name and contact information as a vCard, a W3C standard ontology that itself contains multiple chunks of information. More on this later.
Storing information in small units removes the need to specify how many 'slots' to allow in the data model while also allowing information to be assembled in different ways for different purposes – a familiar concept from the relational database world, but accomplished through an even more granular structure of building blocks – the RDF triple. There are other important differences as well – if you want to learn more, we recommend The Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist, by Dean Allemang and Jim Hendler.
Where VIVO data typically comes from
...