up to Tour start | part 1: what's VIVO? | part 2: what's different about VIVO? | part 3: starting a VIVO project
This page is part 4 of a short, self-paced tour introducing VIVO for use in an interactive workshop or online.
VIVO in an information ecosystem
In addition to identifying data sources for a VIVO and finding the common identifiers to link them together it's also important to think about VIVO as one piece of a larger ecosystem, both locally and when you are ready to start sharing VIVO data out to the world.
VIVO is not all things to all people ...
It's important with any project, especially in the realm of information technology, to be clear with yourself and your colleagues and managers what a new system will not provide in terms of features – to manage expectations, in other words.
VIVO works best as a complement to other systems that handle administrative functions such as personnel or grants management, annual effort and productivity reporting, or operational websites for facilities and services. Because it's been designed to optimize the sharing of data, not just as web pages but by computer request, VIVO is not a good solution for storing private data, and certainly not any information that is confidential or needs to be secure.
Typical pairings with VIVO
Most VIVO installations at larger institutions handle authentication via LDAP, Shibboleth, CAS, or locally-developed systems.
Many VIVO institutions have developed separate utilities for data ingest and updating, or have adapted tools such as the VIVO Harvester or Karma.
Bibliographic metadata on researcher publications remains a big challenge in part because journals and authors are not well identified or disambiguated in many current information systems or on CVs. While national-level systems such as PubMed are improving in that regard by assigning identifiers and including affiliation information on more authors,
on to part 5: VIVO as data
