Abstract
Your institution probably uses a Research Profiling System and/or Networking Tool[1]. It lets you know the structure of your institution and where a person is located within it, not matter how many times. It will tell you who wrote what, when, and with whom.
With your interest in VIVO, you understand the importance of Data Standards and the need to model your data according to an accepted ontology. However, the system you currently use is important to several people, organizations, and workflows that exist at your institution.
Here at Northwestern we have started transitioning from our custom system, LatticeGrid[2][3], to VIVO[4]. We also have a need to keep the functionality of the existing system. In moving from one application to another we have identified several pieces of functionality that do not necessarily rely on the custom data schema, nor do they even rely on the existing web framework. The first concrete example of this move from a custom data schema to the VIVO-ISF is the VIVO Visualization Library[5] project. In this project, we have uncoupled parts of the existing application from the custom data schema to use data from a repository using the VIVO-ISF ontology. The VIVO community can now use this previously internal functionality.