Draft Only of the VIVO 1.6 Release Announcement
Note: The first VIVO 1.6 release candidate is currently undergoing testing, with testing of a second release candidate expected by November 1. No date has set for the VIVO v1.6 release pending completion of all tests of the application and data migration from version 1.5.2.
VIVO version 1.6 is notable for new features, for significant enhancements to the ontology, and for contributions from institutions beyond the seven partners participating in the 2009-2012 National Institutes of Health grant, "VIVO: Enabling National Networking of Scientists" . VIVO version 1.6 also marks the first release under the VIVO Incubator Project with DuraSpace.
The VIVO Ontology has become VIVO-ISF
In February, 2012, near the close of the VIVO (http://vivoweb.org) and eagle-i (https://www.eagle-i.net) projects, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded the CTSAconnect project (http://ctsaconnect.org) as a collaborative effort by the VIVO and eagle-i communities to refactor, extend, and restructure two distinct ontologies into a unified semantic framework. By combining information about researchers, research resources, and clinical expertise in a single, modular ontology framework, VIVO-ISF provides a more flexible and extensible ontology for both the VIVO and eagle-i applications and for innovative downstream applications consuming this growing pool of richly-structured semantic data, including Plumage (https://github.com/CTSIatUCSF/plumage) and CTSAsearch (http://research.icts.uiowa.edu/polyglot/). While end users of VIVO will not sense more continuity than change, under the hood the VIVO-ISF ontology aligns more consistently under the Basic Formal Ontology (http://www.ifomis.org/bfo) and positions VIVO for interoperability with other ontologies. The modular structure of VIVO-ISF also affords adopting sites more flexibility in determining scope and domain focus.
In keeping with VIVO practice, the VIVO 1.6 release incorporates a script to migrate existing content to the new ontology that will be automatically invoked as part of the upgrade process.
Internationalization
VIVO 1.6 offers the option of displaying menus, content, and the ontology in multiple languages, a key step in supporting wider adoption outside the English-speaking world. Data with different standard RDF language tags may be read in and VIVO's display will respect a user's preferred language setting as configured in the web browser to provide the closest available from available content. Support for Interactive addition and editing of content in multiple languages is limited restricted to entity labels with version 1.6, but the application interface can be fully modified outside of the core code base without risk that subsequent releases will overwrite changes.
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
