VIVO

Scholars today face heavier workloads, and the questions they study have grown larger and more intricate, while data gathering, analysis, and display have become far more sophisticated. Meeting these pressures calls for new ways of doing research. Several pieces are taking shape to support this work: an open information infrastructure built on linked open data, freely available open-source software, and a community dedicated to keeping the system sustainable.

This book introduces VIVO, a tool at vivoweb.org for recording information about researchers and their work, including their publications, areas of interest, and institutional affiliations. VIVO offers an expressive ontology, utilities for maintaining that ontology, and a platform that uses it to build and manage linked open data for scholarly use and discovery.

VIVO started as a project at Cornell and was later extended by a consortium funded by the NIH. It is now becoming an open-source project supported by contributors worldwide. By the end of 2012, more than 20 countries and 50 organizations were expected to supply VIVO-formatted data on over one million researchers and research staff. That data covers publications, research resources, events, funding, courses taught, and other scholarly activity. The fast expansion of VIVO and of compatible data sources reflects a broader need to modernize scholarship for the 21st century.