Leslie McIntosh
Vivo National Evaluator
Washington University School of Medicine
Ellen J Cramer
Special Projects Lead
Cornell University
Jonathan Corson-Rikert
Vivo Development Lead
Cornell University
The National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded project, “VIVO: Enabling National Networking of Scientists,” has just completed a fifth release of the VIVO software at the 18-month point of its current two-year grant. This presentation will focus on where VIVO is today, with a review of the implementation progress at all seven project sites, a detailed look into VIVO’s integration into the institutional landscape at Cornell University, and a discussion of the national and international dimensions of VIVO and its future development directions.
VIVO highlights many of the opportunities and challenges of linked open data, including blending local and national data in a multi-institutional context, identifying authoritative information sources, disambiguating authors and organizations, providing appropriate temporal limits on relationships, and reconciling data differences in updates. Each institution on the VIVO project has faced unique challenges and achieved different successes, but common themes have emerged that will help potential adopters and highlight areas of remaining work. VIVO’s role in serving the academic and research mission of a university, as illustrated at Cornell, also presents a compelling value proposition for administrators charged with sustaining the effort at the institutional level. This dynamic will have lasting implications for NIH’s vision of a distributed, institutionally-sustained researcher networking solution serving large research consortia and national-level needs.
Handout (MS WORD)