Sprint 1  VIVO completed its first community sprint this past week.  Ten developers from eight institutions in three countries addressed a wide variety of issues focused on producing the next release of VIVO, VIVO 1.10.  Some of the issues addressed during the sprint included:

• Inclusion of the Cornell Data Distribution API.  This new API allows sites to create their own APIs, providing specific data at web addresses of their choosing.  With data distribution, sites can create SPARQL queries that respond to parameterized web queries of the sites' design.  Data can be returned in a variety of formats, including JSON, ready for use in other software and web sites.  This major new feature greatly simplifies the reuse of VIVO data.
• vivo.owl.  For the first time, the VIVO ontology is available in a single file, with release coordinated with the release of the software.  In addition, ontologies.owl contains information about the ontologies used by VIVO.
• An upgrade to Jena 3.6, supporting NAMED and FROM statements in SPARQL queries.  Data managers can load data into named graphs, and then restrict queries to specific named graphs to simplify data management.
• Improved support for VIVO on Windows.
• Improved text on the home page.  "VIVO is a research-focused discovery tool that enables collaboration among scholars of all disciplines."  We no longer say "scientists."  VIVO has always been about all scholarship.  Now we are a bit clearer about that.
• Internationalization improvements in the capability map.  VIVO continues its work to improve internationalization.
• Analysis of future ontology improvements, including modularization, and upgrading vcard.
• Improved documentation.  A new 1.10 wiki, documenting new features, more than two dozen new pages, and many improved pages throughout.

These features are in addition to features previously completed for 1.10, which include many upgrades to software used by VIVO, inclusion of the Triple Pattern Fragments API and interface, providing a major new way to reuse VIVO data, performance improvements, and inclusion of a new beta theme based on Twitter Bootstrap.

Great thanks to all who participated in our first community sprint, and to Muhammad Javed of Cornell, who served as sprint leader.  Leading a sprint is a big commitment, and Javed did an outstanding job! 

Development Interest Group  Speaking of development, the Development Interest Group meets each Tuesday.  Its easy to get involved.  Join a call.  The wiki page provides information on development activities and calls.  Development is open to all!

Books for VIVO  Looking to build a VIVO library?  From time to time, we will have recommendations regarding books relevant to the VIVO community.  Through study, you can learn more about ontology, queries, information representation, and the approaches VIVO uses to collect, represent, and provide information about scholarship, and share that information with others.

This month, we start at the beginning, with "the VIVO Book".  Written by community members in 2012, the VIVO book has edited chapters regarding information models, ingesting data, querying data, and the future of VIVO.  From the preface:

The world of scholarship is changing rapidly. Increasing demands on scholars, the growing size and complexity of questions and problems to be addressed, and advances in sophistication of data collection, analysis, and presentation require new approaches to scholarship. A ubiquitous, open information infrastructure for scholarship, consisting of linked open data, open-source software tools, and a community committed to sustainability are emerging to meet the needs of scholars today.

Börner, K, Conlon, M., Corson-Rikert, J., and Ding, Y. (eds) (2012) VIVO: A Semantic Approach to Scholarly Networking and Discovery (Synthesis Lectures on the Semantic Web) 1st Edition, Morgan-Claypool Publisher, ISBN 978-1608459933. 154 pages.

Conference Update  The VIVO Conference is coming up, June 6-8 at the JB Duke Hotel on the campus of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, served by the Raleigh-Durham airport,  and includes a great line-up of keynote speakers, community presentations, posters, workshops and "unconference" sessions that can be organized by the attendees.  Register today! http://vivoconference.org 

Membership  VIVO is supported by its members.  Leadership and Steering is composed of members, along with 3 participants nominated by the Leadership Group and elected from the community.  We encourage all sites using VIVO to become members of Duraspace supporting VIVO.  Becoming a member has multiple benefits in addition to participating in VIVO project governance.  To consider membership, please contact Mike Conlon.  If you are ready to become a member, please visit http://bit.ly/dura-join The project needs your support to continue to improve everything VIVO does.  We'd love to answer any questions you may have about membership.

Your note here  Do you have an update for the VIVO community that you would like to see included in VIVO Updates?  It's simple – just send Mike Conlon your update by Saturday of any week, and the update will appear in VIVO Updates the next day on Sunday.  Notes on action planning, the conference, software development, training, documentation, community engagement, conferences to attend, recent presentations and papers, are all very welcome!  The VIVO community is very active across the world.  Please share you what you are doing with VIVO.  We'd love to hear from you!

Go VIVO!

Mike

Mike Conlon 
VIVO Project Director