Draft Only of the VIVO 1.6 Release Announcement
Note: The second VIVO 1.6 release candidate is currently undergoing testing, with testing of a third release candidate expected by November 15. 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 developers at institutions beyond the seven partners participating in the 2009-2012 National Institutes of Health VIVO grant. VIVO version 1.6 also marks the first release under the VIVO Incubator Project with DuraSpace.
The VIVO ontology has become VIVO-ISF
The recently completed CTSAconnect project (http://ctsaconnect.org) has refactored, extended, and restructured the VIVO (http://vivoweb.org) and eagle-i (https://www.eagle-i.net) ontologies into a unified semantic framework. By combining information about researchers, research resources, and clinical expertise in a single, modular structure, 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 see more continuity than change, the VIVO-ISF ontology aligns more consistently with the Basic Formal Ontology (http://www.ifomis.org/bfo) and better positions VIVO for interoperability with other international ontologies. The modular structure of VIVO-ISF also affords adopting sites more flexibility in determining scope and domain focus.
In keeping with previous practice, the VIVO 1.6 release automatically invokes a data migration script to convert existing content to the new ontology as part of the upgrade process. A new application configuration ontology
Internationalization
VIVO 1.6 offers the option of displaying menus, content, and ontology labels in alternative and/or multiple languages, a key step in supporting wider VIVO adoption beyond the English-speaking world. By extracting English labels from menus, page templates, and the ontology, the language of VIVO's application interface can be fully modified outside of the core code base by copying and translating a small number of files without risk that subsequent releases will overwrite changes. And when multiple language support is enabled by local option, VIVO will respect a user's preferred browser language setting to display the closest matching content identified using standard RDF language tags.
VIVO 1.6 does not yet offer full support for editing of all content in multiple languages – only the primary labels for entities. VIVO's RDF add and remove functions will allow full replication of content in multiple languages, however, for situations where multiple language support is essential.
Web services
For the first time, VIVO 1.6 exposes data addition, update, and delete actions through an authenticated web service, allowing more seamless interfacing to data ingest tools and opening up options for external applications to write as well as read VIVO data. We anticipate that web services will increase the already rapid pace of development of tools working alongside VIVO to provide extended visualization, editing, reporting, analysis, disambiguation, or repository services. Chris Barnes from the University of Florida is leading a new VIVO Apps & Tools working group highlighting existing tools and featuring biweekly calls to address new functionality.
Performance improvements
Two VIVO adopters have contributed code to support faster page rendering for VIVO when a user is not logged in to edit, allowing VIVO profiles to scale as necessary with much less effect on responsiveness. VIVO pages now carry standard HTTP caching headers that web servers and/or more specialized caching libraries can exploit to deliver content that has not changed nearly instantaneously.
VIVO's search indexing has also been extended to support re-indexing a specific subset of data known to have changed, allowing more efficient processing of incremental updates to publications or other content.
Look and feel
VIVO keeps the same overall look and feel while sporting a new and more dynamic home page including rotating features highlighting individual research areas, researchers, and departments as well as more prominent statistics on key content elements. An optional map view highlighting the global, national, or regional geographic research focus may also be activated and customized to local preference.
- 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
