back up to User Stories: Defining features and functionality VIVO needs - September 2011
to be written
Expertise is often modeled through links to standard vocabularies of terms, often specific to one domain or a set of domains. Links are sometimes applied to people and publications, but can be associated with grants, organizations, events, equipment, and almost any other type of individual in VIVO.
While VIVO can store subject terms, the ontology team has felt from the beginning of the project that storing entire controlled vocabularies in the VIVO database would not make sense. There are too many candidate vocabularies, and many of them are very large, having tens or even hundreds of thousands of terms. Controlled vocabularies or thesauri also change frequently – Medical Subject Headings or MeSH is updated every year, for example.
With version 1.4, VIVO will support external vocabulary references that will store the URI of a controlled vocabulary term along with its label. This direct linking will help disambiguate terms which may as strings be common to several vocabularies but have different definitions in each.
The desired controlled vocabulary must be available as RDF.