up to Tour start | part 1: what's VIVO? | part 2: what's different about VIVO? | part 3: starting a VIVO project | part 4: VIVO in an information ecosystem
This page is part 5 of a short, self-paced tour introducing VIVO for use in an interactive workshop or online.
VIVO as data
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.
Linked data
The Linked Open Data movement has been gaining traction for several years through promotion by Sir Tim Berners Lee, the W3C, among others including members of the VIVO community active in the U.S. data.gov effort.
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 it mean to have VIVO serve linked data? 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.
SPARQL endpoints
A number of VIVO institutions maintain public SPARQL endpoints – query points using the SPARQL query language against the VIVO triplestore, or VIVO's database of RDF. These allow anyone to harvest not only the data about one person or other entity in VIVO but to run general-purpose queries.
Very often the goal in querying a VIVO is to extract RDF to include in another VIVO instance. The American Psychological Association, for example, queries VIVOs at several universities for updates on the authors of APA publication whose publication-related profiles are also maintained in vivo.apa.org.
Dr. David Eichmann of the Institute for Clinical & Translational Science at the University of Iowa has built a CTSAsearch similar in concept to vivosearch.org but leveraging SPARQL endpoints as well as linked open data requests.
Web-focused semantic services
Consuming RDF triples from VIVO in common web content management system may take some translation to more common XML, JSON or HTML formats. Tools to help with this conversion are multiplying, with JSON-LD emerging in the JSON arena, Java and a Google code PHP implementations of a linked data API, and John Fereira's semantic services used in production at Cornell.
For more information
More about Data export, reporting, and reuse in this wiki
On to part 6, VIVO in production
