Draft Only of the VIVO 1.6 Release Announcement
Note: no date has yet been projected for the VIVO v1.6 release pending ongoing testing of the first release candidate
VIVO 1.6 is notable for new features, for a significant restructuring of the ontology, and for the expansion of the number of individuals and institutions directly contributing code to the release. VIVO 1.6 is also the first major release since completion of the National Institutes of Health VIVO Project, in August, 2012, and marks the first release by the VIVO community since the launch of the VIVO Incubator Project with DuraSpace.
The VIVO Ontology has become VIVO-ISF
In February, 2012, near the close of the NIH VIVO and eagle-i projects, NIH funded members of the VIVO and eagle-i communities via the 18-month CTSAconnect Project to refactor, extend, and restructure their respective ontologies unified semantic framework serving broader needs by addressing research resources and clinical expertise as well as people, organizations, and their research activities and outputs, the traditional focus area of the VIVO ontology.
The VIVO-Integrated Semantic Framework ontology, or VIVO-ISF, maintains key structural features of the VIVO version 1.5 ontology while providing a more modular and extensible structure. End users will initially see few differences in VIVO, and while those providing implementation and ontology support to existing VIVO sites will notice a number of new options, the emphasis in VIVO 1.6 has been on continuity and better positioning of VIVO for future growth, including improved alignment under the Basic Formal Ontology to facilitate interoperability with a large number of domain ontologies adhering to its fundamental structure and principles.
As with past VIVO releases, the VIVO 1.6 release incorporates a script to migrate existing content to the new ontology. This script will be invoked as part of the upgrade process to accomplish as much as possible of the migration to the ISF automatically. In some cases local review will be necessary to confirm that existing data have been interpreted and categorized correctly.
New Features
VIVO 1.6 addresses:
performance
- caching
- ability to update only a specific list of new URIs in the search index
extensibility, through RDF web service
internationalization, with caveats that support for administrative functions and managing duplicate content in different languages through the same URI will come in 1.7
new home page features including an optional map
application configuration ontology designed for 1.5 implementation and used for ISF simpler properties
others
Code Contributors
Stephen Williams from the University of Colorado Boulder, Ted Lawless from Brown, and Mark Fallu from Griffith
