Jon Corson-Rikert retires from Cornell.  Jon Corson-Rikert, the creator of VIVO, has retired from Cornell.  It is hard for me to imagine a better colleague – thoughtful, considerate, creative, insightful, respectful, productive, and genuinely kind.  I hope you had a chance to meet Jon, to see him present, to work with him, and to share your thoughts with him.  Too often we rush through our days.  You may want to stop for a moment and recall moments you may have had with Jon and what those moments mean to you.  

I first met Jon on-line in the spring of 2009, to think through how we might apply for an NIH grant to support the development of VIVO.  The grant team gelled quickly and certainly was a good omen for the collaboration that was to come.  I met Jon in person for the first time in December of that year, in Washington DC, at the kick-off meeting of the grant.  I visited Cornell in the summer of 2010.  Jon and I had a wonderful lunch and afternoon surrounded by sunflowers in the beautiful New York countryside sharing all manner of ideas regarding the representation of scholarship and the role of VIVO in the world.  And of course our joint work and discussions continued until this past week.

Jon intends to spend time with his family and grandchildren.  And perhaps he will participate in the VIVO community in the future.  I certainly hope so and wish him and his family all the very best!

What does scholarship look like?  Scholarship, the creation, transmission, and preservation of knowledge, takes many forms.  From agriculture, to medicine, to physics, to philosophy, scholars are engaged in classrooms, laboratories, clinics, libraries, communities, on land, sea and sky, across the world.  VIVO is looking for pictures of scholarship to use on our web site.  Do you have a picture you'd like to share?  Photos must be a minimum of 1800 pixels wide, 72 dpi, and available for VIVO to use without license restrictions (CC-BY or CC-0 would be most helpful).  If you have a photo you would like us to consider using on the VIVO home page, please contact Mike Conlon.  We will, of course, give credit where credit is due.  We look forward to seeing your views of scholarship.

OpenRIF and VIVO at Force11. OpenRIF Semantic Web Infrastructure for the Scholarly Landscape, will be presented as a workshop at the Force 11 conference in Portland, Oregon, USA on Sunday, April 17, from 9-12.  If you are attending Force11, you should consider attending this workshop to learn more about OpenRIF and its work on the VIVO-ISF ontology.  Violeta IlikMelissa HaendelShahim EssaidMike Conlon, and George Chacko, from NETE will be presenting.  And if you weren't planning to attend Force11, perhaps this is reason for you to go!

Outreach and Engagement Call call this Thursday. The Outreach and Engagement Interest Group will have its call this Thursday at 1 PM Eastern US time.  No experience with VIVO is needed.  Calls discuss how to engage the university community in the use of VIVO.  All are welcome on the calls.  Contact Julia Trimmer for further information.  For dates of additional upcoming VIVO calls and meetings, see the VIVO Calendar of the front page of the VIVO wiki.

Go VIVO!

Mike

Mike Conlon
VIVO Project Director