Email lists.  For some time, VIVO has operated a number of email lists at SourceForge. The lists were confusing, difficult for people to join, and often fractured discussion.  The Asset Task Force recommended consolidating the lists and improving the ability to join and search lists.  The result is a plan to move to new lists:

• vivo-community@googlegoups.com.  This list will be used for all discussions having to do with building community – inside organizations and across organizations.  The list is currently active.  Please join this list at http://www.googlegroup.com to participate in these discussions.
• vivo-tech@googlegroups.com.  This list will be used for all technical discussions – system administration, data management, ontology, RDF, SPARQL.  The list will be created soon and we we will subscribe all members of the current technical lists (vivo-ontology, vivo-dev-all, and vivo-imp-issues) to the new list.  Archives of the old lists will be available as an archive of the new list.  Please join this list at http://www.googlegroups.com if you are interested in participating in technical discussions.
• vivo-all@googlegroups.com This list will be for announcements and VIVO Updates.  People subscribed to this list will receive limited announcement/digest type email.  If the discussions on the other lists are too active you may wish to subscribe only to vivo-all.

The move to the new lists will be done over the coming weeks.  Please continue to use the old lists until the new ones are in place.  We hope these changes are an improvement, simplifying the lists, clarifying their purpose and improving service to the community.  For an overview of the changes, review of purpose, and methods for migration, see https://goo.gl/sQ5onA

Registry.  Interested in performance benchmarking?  Please plan to join the Weekly Implementation and Development Calls this Thursday at 1 PM eastern US time for a discussion of possible benchmarking of future releases of VIVO.  Using standard data sets, standard hardware configurations and standard work mixes, we hope to produce benchmark timings of VIVO performance.  This should help us quantify improvements in VIVO software performance over time, measure the impact of alternate triple stores on performance, and provide assistance to sites looking to improve the performance of their local implementations.  What should be included?  How might benchmarks help your site?  Join the discussion Thursday.

Visualizations.  Much of what VIVO is doing in modeling and representing data regarding scholarship, employs patterns and techniques that are well-developed across the semantic web and linked data communities.  Issues of ontology design, construction and use of URI, cross-site linking and more are common issues.  A free eBook by Leigh Dodds and Ian Darby, Linked Data Patterns, collects the discussions of these issues from the Linked Data email lists and presents them as a series of recommendations.  See  http://patterns.dataincubator.org/book/.

Go VIVO!

Mike

Mike Conlon
VIVO Project Director