up to Tour start | part 1: what's VIVO?
This page is part 2 of a short, self-paced tour introducing VIVO for use in an interactive workshop or online.
What's different (and noteworthy) about VIVO?
Our tour example – vivo.vivoweb.org
Vivo.vivoweb.org is a VIVO community tool to help connect users of VIVO based on geographic location, institutional type or affiliation, stage of implementing VIVO, or individual expertise. It's largely populated and updated by the community using a shared login, and provides a place for people new to VIVO to try out the software while learning about the larger VIVO community.
The vivo.vivoweb.org site extends the standard ISF/VIVO ontology with a few classes and relationships to highlight VIVO installations and the typical range of skills needed to set up, populate, and maintain a VIVO instance (as discussed more in part 3 of this tour).
VIVO's not just people.
VIVO is not just people profiles or the usual static mix of department and faculty web pages. If you try a search for 'ontology' 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.
A publication in VIVO is modeled not as one entity but as several – the article or book itself, a journal or publisher, each author, and additional objects representing the date of publication, editors or translators, and author order. Publications modeled individually rather than just embedded as text citations on a person's web page can be linked to each co-author and assembled into reports by journal, topic, academic department, research grant or facility, or time period.
Making connections explicit.
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 a links to other pages, including the University of Pennsylvania VIVO, that ensure relationships are pointed out and can be navigated in both directions.
Links in VIVO are automatically bidirectional unless you configure them not to be. You've see online retailers point out to you that "customers who bought this item also bought" accessories, supplies, or other items by the same author or manufacturer – a common and very effective behavioral merchandizing technique. These relationships form networks of connections that ultimately enable remarkable visualizations.
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.
Structured data.
Because VIVO models data in a very granular way, it can be combined and reused more easily than web pages composed only of unstructured text and HTML markup. Try browsing a VIVO page in a linked data browser such as LinkSailor, where the structure underlying the HTML display of the same data in VIVO can be clearly seen.
What does this mean? VIVO data is accessible, discoverable, reusable, and portable – all important factors given the work involved in gathering and maintaining accurate and complete information about researchers and what they do.
For more information
Read about Linked Open Data
on to part 3: starting a VIVO project
