Dean B. Krafft
Chief Technology Strategist
Cornell University
Valrie Davis
Outreach Librarian for Agricultural Sciences
University of Florida
VIVO is an open-source semantic Web application that enables the discovery of research and scholarship across disciplines at an institution. Originally developed from 2003-2009 by Cornell University, in September 2009 the National Institute of Health’s National Center for Research Resources made a grant to the University of Florida, Cornell University, Indiana University Bloomington, and four implementation partners to use VIVO to create a national network for scientists. This network will allow researchers to discover potential collaborators with specific expertise, based on authoritative information on projects, grants, publications, affiliations, and research interests, essentially creating a social network for browsing, visualizing, and discovering scientists. This talk will give an overview of the technical underpinnings of VIVO, describe how it integrates with the larger semantic Web, sketch out the plans for enabling discovery across the national network of VIVO sites, and explore the role of libraries in implementing VIVO at all the partner sites. The VIVO project brings together fundamental library expertise in organizing and describing information with cutting-edge IT tools for ontologies, reasoning, and the semantic Web, all at Web scale.