Abstract
Many different institutions or organizations currently employ VIVO in ways that diverge from or extend
the use of VIVO as a researcher profiling application. Some of the known ways of using VIVO include
the management of metadata or scholarly record, modeling information in different domains, and using
visualizations or other front-end systems to expose the information within VIVO. Several of these
projects have explored or are exploring extensions to the ontology as well as extensions to the core VIVO
architecture for retrieval, querying, and display of content whether presented to the user using VIVO itself
or another front-end.
The central question we wish to address in this presentation is:
- How can VIVO architecture be extended to help develop the larger VIVO community infrastructure required to address the issues and challenges with which the community is currently grappling?
- In other words, what kinds of APIs and points of connection should we enable to help VIVO to be used more successfully within the deployed application’s larger institutional ecosystem?
To this end, we propose conducting a survey of the VIVO community to better understand how VIVO is employed on the ground and analyze these results to find patterns, trends, and challenges. We plan on providing concrete examples of some of these challenges and opportunities for further development by discussing specific use cases and implementations of VIVO. We will also discuss the architectural components which can help implement the infrastructure required to address some of these opportunities for a more robust VIVO community technological infrastructure.