VIVO Scholar was created in response to the Leadership Group’s Product Direction statement for 2019, which calls for modernizing VIVO’s user interface or presentation layer and decoupling the VIVO architecture. VIVO Scholar is a separate component, part of VIVO’s move towards a more modular architecture.
VIVO Scholar’s biggest benefits are:
With GraphQL, your institution can display your VIVO data on departmental, lab, and individual websites, such as for a list of recent publications, a faculty directory, and a search for researchers by discipline, such as cancer or infectious diseases. VIVO Scholar provides an institutional workflow for faculty to update their data in one place. "Update once, use everywhere."
VIVO Scholar Beta provides:
The VIVO Scholar Beta is read-only. VIVO Scholar works with VIVO, which can serve as the editing interface.The VIVO Scholar Beta is a minimally-viable version of VIVO, supporting people, organizations, publications, grants, and courses data.
Here’s a quick comparison of VIVO and VIVO Scholar profiles:
The search results in VIVO and VIVO Scholar differ as follows:
VIVO Scholar’s GraphQL endpoint provides an easy, developer-friendly mechanism for sharing VIVO data with local websites at your institution. GraphQL makes it easy to create dynamic web content such as:
The GraphQL endpoint works like VIVO widgets does for institutions such as Duke; with GraphQL, web developers can easily set up data feeds to their local websites. Repurposing data is an important institutional benefit because it makes institutional data available to the units for their own purposes.
Data can be loaded to systems for reporting and dashboards, such as Tableau, and other content management systems such as Drupal.
There is no single recommended configuration for VIVO; it depends on how much data will be loaded into VIVO. For more information, see the VIVO hardware and software requirements page in the VIVO wiki.
For specific information about installing VIVO Scholar, refer to the VIVO Scholar README in GitHub. For information about installing Scholars Discovery, read the Scholars Discovery README in GitHub.
This depends on how much customization is planned for your implementation. To customize VIVO Scholar to your own institution, to add search facets, and to consume data from GraphQL, web developers will need to be skilled in HTML, CSS, and Javascript. The following tools are used:
To add data fields, customizations, or more functionality to the VIVO Scholar UI, back-end developers will need a familiarity with the following:
Yes. The VIVO Scholar Beta currently works only with a VIVO implementation.
Existing VIVO implementations can add VIVO Scholar + Scholars Discovery to their VIVO project. New VIVO implementations can install VIVO and VIVO Scholar + Scholars Discovery.
Another option is to install VIVO and with Scholars Discovery, then use the GraphQL endpoint to create your own user interface. For information about Scholars Discovery, see the Scholars Discovery README in GitHub.
No, the VIVO Scholar Beta works only with VIVO. However, future development work may add capabilities to use VIVO Scholar without VIVO, in accordance with the discussion at the 2019 Architectural Fly-In. For more information, contact anyone on the VIVO Scholar Task Force.
VIVO Scholar displays data provided by GraphQL and Scholars Discovery. Scholars Discovery supports the VIVO ontologies. To find more about Scholars Discovery, refer to the scholars-discovery repository.
VIVO sites using versions 1.10 and 1.11 enable data to be exported in TDB file format, which is the simplest way to load data into Scholars Discovery. Data exported in SDB format from earlier versions of VIVO can be used with Scholars Discovery too, and there is also a SPARQL interface for loading data into Scholars Discovery. See the harvester information in the Scholars Discovery README in GitHub.
One of the great features of GraphQL is that it’s self-documenting. Just refer to the GraphQL endpoint list to see the data available.
Installation instructions are detailed in the VIVO Scholar README and the Scholars Discovery README. Additionally a Docker-based quickstart is available at: https://github.com/vivo-community/vivo-scholar-ui-demo
Yes, Scholars Discovery provides both GraphQL and REST APIs based on your VIVO data. Use these to provide data to non-semantic consumers.
Your existing VIVO will continue to function as is. Vivo Scholar provides an alternate UI with its own URL scheme.
That depends on your data set. Loading time depends on the number of people, publications, grants and courses being loaded. The sample data set includes 26 sample researchers and loads quickly, in just a few minutes. We estimate that TDB files take about 15 minutes per 100 researchers to load. Objects with lots of properties also affect loading time.
By default, Scholars Discovery loads from a specified TDB directory. SDB and Sparql harvesters are available. See the Scholars Discovery README for more information.
To use the default TDB harvester, export your data in TDB format.
VIVO Scholar provides translation of static text and labels. VIVO Scholar could become fully language-aware in future versions.
The image exists only in the running instance of VIVO. Scholars Discovery could (eventually) harvest images and put in a file store. Currently, we can’t make images part of the sample dataset.
VIVO Scholar runs on Go Buffalo (https://gobuffalo.io/en/) and uses Plush templates (https://github.com/gobuffalo/plush).
Colors are set via environment variables documented at /docs/elements/color-palette of your running instance. Default values can be seen at: https://vivo-scholars-scholars.cloud.duke.edu/docs/elements/color-palette
This is a discussion currently underway in the VIVO committers group. It’s possible that we can schedule a community sprint in the fall of 2020 to move VIVO Scholar to a production release.
Stay tuned for more information.
Enhancements to VIVO Scholar Beta will come from two groups:
With the beta release, regular weekly task force meetings have been suspended and the task force will continue to meet upon request.
Please send development questions and issues to the VIVO-Tech email list. Strategic and implementation questions can go to the VIVO-Community list. Of course, you’re welcome to reach out to anyone on the VIVO Scholar Task Force. We’re happy to help directly or point you to someone who can give you more information.