VIVO is an open source ontology and software system designed at Cornell University for researchers and used in many universities in the USA that has attracted interest more widely internationally.  It is based on the Semantic Web / Linked Open Data concept.  Recent development has been supported by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, U24 RR029822, through a consortium of universities led by the University of Florida and including Cornell University, Indiana University, Ponce School of Medicine, The Scripps Research Institute, Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine, and Weill Cornell Medical College.

CASRAI is a non-profit standards development organization. CASRAI is an international community of leading research funders and institutions collaborating to ensure seamless interoperability of research information. They collectively develop and maintain a common data dictionary and advance best practices for data exchange and reuse between research teams, institutions, and funding agencies throughout the entire life-cycle of research activity.

“The VIVO community recognizes the need for broader input into the VIVO ontology from the academic, government, and private sectors, within the U.S. and internationally,” says Jon Corson-Rikert, the VIVO Development Lead and member of the VIVO Ontology Team. “CASRAI offers a uniquely independent and technology-neutral process for assembling, reviewing, and recommending common data elements and their interrelationships, going beyond people to other key research activities and resources.  We look forward to joining the CASRAI dictionary process and helping to launch a U.S. component of this important effort.”

“Research interoperability at a global scale is a puzzle with many pieces,” says David Baker, CASRAI Executive Director, “The CASRAI dictionary is just one piece of that puzzle. Implementations like VIVO are another crucial piece. VIVO makes it possible to integrate data about researchers between multiple institutions. A common international language for research information combined with a diverse network of systems that speak this language puts seamless research interoperability within our reach.”

The VIVO and CASRAI collaboration will focus on:

• advancing a common global approach to interoperability within the US research community,
• advancing ontology-centric views of the CASRAI dictionary,
• advancing the Semantic Web as a medium for global research information sharing.

This partnership will further facilitate a diverse collection of activities associated with the VIVO project, across federal agencies, professional societies, data providers, and a variety of efforts with the Semantic Web and ontology development communities. The VIVO/CASRAI collaboration to advance a common approach to research interoperability will also serve to enhance the efforts at VIVO implementations across the United States and around the world as scholars look to share their research efforts and promote their expertise. Significant partners of the VIVO project include: the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture), the ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) Initiative, the American Psychological Association and the Publish Trust Project, Symplectic Limited, Wellspring Worldwide, and the Australian-based ANDS VIVO project, a collaboration of the University of Melbourne, Queensland University of Technology, and Griffith University. The cooperation will strengthen the VIVO team‚ augment VIVO and CASRAI’s international links and provide many opportunities for joint developments to the benefit of the worldwide research community.

For more information contact:

VIVO contact:

Jon Corson-Rikert
Head, Information Technology Services
201 Albert R. Mann Library
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853
607 255-4608
jc55 at cornell.edu

CASRAI contact:
David Baker
Executive Director, CASRAI
200 – 440 Laurier Ave. W
Ottawa ON  K1R7X6
Desk: 613-832-0304
dbaker at casrai.org

euroCRIS is mandated by the European Commission to maintain, develop and promote CERIF (Common European Research Information Format) a European Union Recommendation to member states.

VIVO is an open source ontology and software system designed at Cornell University for researchers and used in many universities in the USA that has attracted interest more widely internationally.

Recently euroCRIS has developed a technology to interoperate the formalised database structure of CERIF with linked open data / semantic web^! constructs thus this cooperation is timely.

We propose to structure the cooperation in three aspects:

1.  Interoperation and convergence of semantics in the two systems;
2. Interoperation of the systems to allow homogeneous access over heterogeneous research information systems;
3. Exploring utilising the VIVO user interface for researchers as a ‘front-end’ to the CERIF research information storage environment;

Full statements on eurocris.org and vivoweb.org.

The Summer 2011 issue of NISO’s Information Standards Quarterly magazine is now available in open access in PDF from the NISO website. Guest Content Editor, Helen Henderson, Managing Director at Information Power Ltd. has assembled an excellent overview of the major standards and initiative on the special issue theme of Organization and People Identifiers. As she states in her introductory letter: “Identifiers have always been essential standards in libraries and publishing. Content identifiers, such as the ISBN, are well established, but institutional and personal identifiers are much newer, the need having emerged as more and more content is available electronically.”

Both the entire issue and individual articles may be freely downloaded. Visit: http://www.niso.org/publications/isq/2011/v23no3/

Questions include:

1. What was the motivation for developing the identifier system?
2. Which organisation(s) is (are) responsible for the identifier
   system?
3. What is the scope of your identifier system, in terms of the type of people it covers?
4. How is your system populated with data?
5. Who is authorised to make changes to the information in the system?
6. How are identifiers assigned?
7. What form does the identifier take?
8. What information is maintained in the system? Are any standard metadata schemes supported?
9. With which other systems (if any) does your identifier system interact?
10. Is the information in the system made available to other services?
11. Is there a licence on the data? If so, what is the licence?
12. If yes, how is this achieved (what interfaces/protocols are used) and is the system free to access?
13. How is the system funded?
14. Is the system still under active development? If so, what are your priorities for future enhancements?
15. Do you have any plans for integrating your system with external initiatives/services such as ORCID, ISNI, Mendeley, Zotero, Academia.edu?

We look forward to seeing the report when the study is concluded.

Registration is now closed, but the meeting agenda is online.  Look for updates following the meeting on the meeting page or in ORCID news.

• identifying & attributing authors/creators of scholarly works, with a focus on ORCID, the Open Researcher and Contributor ID initiative
• identification for access management purposes, i.e. with a focus on federated identity management

Sessions address challenges in identifying and attributing knowledge contributors, e-infrastructure possibilities for authenticating and authorizing researchers, unique identifiers and the digital scholar, and researchers’ needs for an authentication and authorization infrastructure.

VIVO is also an ontology — http://vivoweb.org/ontology/core — serving as a common information model for two prominent research networking tools, Harvard Profiles (http://profiles.catalyst.harvard.edu/) and the VIVO software (http://vivo.sourceforge.net).  The Loki system at the University of Iowa (http://www.icts.uiowa.edu/Loki/FAQ.jsp) will also export its data as RDF conforming to the VIVO ontology.

The VIVO software and ontology have both been supported since 2009 by the U.S. National Institutes of Health through the VIVO: Enabling National Networking of Scientists Project (http://vivoweb.org, NCRR U24 RR029822).  VIVO originated in the Cornell University Library in 2003, but implementations and development efforts have expanded to the 6 other institutional partners on the NIH grant and to a number of additional institutions in the U.S., Central America, Australia, and China to date.

This community has been started to allow wider discussion of linked open data for research networking, including information about research resources equally important in understanding the overall picture. The VIVO community has benefited from the active involvement of members of the eagle-i Consortium (https://www.eagle-i.org), and we are working to make the VIVO and eagle-i ontologies directly interoperable.

We welcome your interest and participation.