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 been 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 an integrated 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 gives 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 allows more context-dependent labeling and will be extended in the next release to allow additional customization of page displays without programming.
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.
While VIVO's interface is language aware, VIVO 1.6 language support is read-only – meaning that only primary labels can be interactively entered or modified to reflect multiple languages, and only in public-facing pages. We anticipate expanding multiple language editing support in our next release based on VIVO community input and additional user interface design.
Web services
For the first time, VIVO 1.6 exposes data add, update, and delete actions through an authenticated web service. This allows more seamless interfacing to data ingest tools and allows new options for external applications to read and write 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 unchanged content in an instant.
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. Responses to linked data requests are faster and more concise, and include a link to the "terms of use" statement provided by the implementing institution.
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.
And many more improvements
In addition to the above major features, VIVO 1.6 includes many updated libraries, and offers implementing sites additional control over building, deployment, access control, and supplementing VIVO pages with additional queries and reports. VIVO's internal SPARQL query endpoint may be configured for authorized access and now supports HTTP content negotiation and JSON-LD.
For additional detail on these and other improvements, please review the full VIVO 1.6 Release Notes.
New Code Contributors
The VIVO development team gratefully acknowledges code contributions for VIVO 1.6 by Ted Lawless from Brown University, and Mark Fallu from Griffith University, and Stephen Williams from the University of Colorado Boulder. We also appreciate extensive bug reports, testing, and feedback from members of the VIVO development, implementation, and ontology working groups.
