VIVO is a web-based,

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

suite of computer software for managing data about researchers, scientists, and faculty members. VIVO uses

Semantic Web The Semantic Web, sometimes known as Web 3.0, is an extension of the World Wide Web through standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The goal of the Semantic Web is to make Internet data machine-readable. To enable the encoding o ...

techniques to represent people and their work. As of 2020, it is used by dozens of universities and the

United States Department of Agriculture The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is an executive department of the United States federal government that aims to meet the needs of commercial farming and livestock food production, promotes agricultural trade and producti ...

History

The

Cornell University Cornell University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York, United States. The university was co-founded by American philanthropist Ezra Cornell and historian and educator Andrew Dickson W ...

Library originally created VIVO in 2003 as a "virtual

life sciences This list of life sciences comprises the branches of science that involve the scientific study of life – such as microorganisms, plants, and animals including human beings. This science is one of the two major branches of natural science, ...

community". In 2009, the National Institutes of Health awarded a $12.2 million grant to

University of Florida The University of Florida (Florida or UF) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Gainesville, Florida, United States. It is a senior member of the State University System of Florida and a preem ...

Indiana University Indiana University (IU) is a state university system, system of Public university, public universities in the U.S. state of Indiana. The system has two core campuses, five regional campuses, and two regional centers under the administration o ...

Ponce School of Medicine The Ponce Health Sciences University (PHSU), formerly Ponce School of Medicine & Health Sciences, is a private, for-profit university in Ponce, Puerto Rico and St. Louis, Missouri. It awards graduate degrees in Medicine (MD), Clinical Psycholog ...

The Scripps Research Institute Scripps Research is a nonprofit American medical research facility that focuses on research and education in the biomedical sciences. Headquartered in San Diego, California, the institute has over 170 laboratories employing 2,100 scientists, tec ...

Washington University in St. Louis Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) is a private research university in St. Louis, Missouri, United States. Founded in 1853 by a group of civic leaders and named for George Washington, the university spans 355 acres across its Danforth ...

, and

Weill Cornell Medical College Weill Cornell Medicine (; officially Joan and Sanford I. Weill Medical College of Cornell University), originally Cornell University Medical College, is the medical school of Cornell University, located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in Ne ...

to expand the tool for use outside of Cornell.

Data ingest

VIVO can harvest publication data from

PubMed PubMed is an openly accessible, free database which includes primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institute ...

, CSV files, relational databases, or

OAI-PMH The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a protocol developed for harvesting metadata descriptions of records in an archive so that services can be built using metadata from many archives. An implementation of OAI ...

harvest. It then uses a semi-automated process to match publications to researchers. It also harvests information about researchers from Human Resources systems and

student information system A student information system (SIS), student management system, school administration software or student administration system is a management information system for education sector establishments used to manage student data. It supports communic ...

Ontology

The VIVO ontology incorporates elements of several established ontologies, including

Dublin Core 140px, Logo of DCMI, maintenance agency for Dublin Core Terms The Dublin Core vocabulary, also known as the Dublin Core Metadata Terms (DCMT), is a general purpose metadata vocabulary for describing resources of any type. It was first developed ...

Basic Formal Ontology Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) is a Upper ontology, top-level ontology developed by Barry Smith (academic), Barry Smith and his associates for the purposes of promoting interoperability among domain ontologies built in its terms through a process of ...

, Bibliographic Ontology,

FOAF FOAF (an acronym of friend of a friend) is a machine-readable ontology describing persons, their activities and their relations to other people and objects. Anyone can use FOAF to describe themselves. FOAF allows groups of people to describe so ...

, and

SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) is a W3C recommendation designed for representation of thesauri, classification schemes, taxonomies, subject-heading systems, or any other type of structured controlled vocabulary. SKOS is part of t ...

. The ontology can be used to describe several roles of faculty members, including research, teaching, and service. The Dutch

Data Archiving and Networked Services Data ( , ) are a collection of discrete or continuous values that convey information, describing the quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted formally ...

and

worked to develop the ontology to enable bilingual modeling of researchers.

References

{{Reflist Semantic Web Ontology (information science) Bibliometrics software Free library and information science software Scholarly databases 2003 software