About Some VIVO Things

About the Site

The idea for the site came from Chris Barnes at the University of Florida. Chris and I have been working on VIVO since 2009. Chris thought I should have a web site to talk about VIVO -- a blog, and a site that could introduce people to the various repositories at GitHub containing the various tools that I have written for VIVO over the years.

As usual, I protested -- too busy, can't learn more things, but Chris persisted. And, as usual, Chris was right. He taught me to use GitHub and to put my software in repos. He suggested that I use "Twitter Bootstrap," and that I build my site at GitHub using Twitter Bootstrap.

I did both. I created this site, hosted from GitHub. All files are in a GitHub. You can fork the site if you like. And I adopted Twitter Bootstrap for a clean look and "mobile first" formatting. This site looks good on a browser, a tablet or a phone. That's due to Twitter Bootstrap.

I like data. I like creating it, managing it, analysing it, displaying it, and making it available to others. This site is mostly about VIVO data -- creating data to put in VIVO, and taking data out of VIVO to use for a variety of purposes. This site assumes you have a VIVO, or are building one. It assumes you know something about VIVO and would like to learn more. It assumes that you like to learn. It assumes that you want to use VIVO data. If those sound like your interests, you've come to the right place.

About the VIVO Project

VIVO has been around since 2006, created at Cornell University. It took off from 2009 to 2012 as the result of a large multi-institutional project, which I had the honour of leading. At its peak, more than 180 people were working on the project at seven schools -- Cornell University in Ithaca, Indiana University in Bloomington, the University of Florida, where I worked, Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, Washington University at St. Louis College of Medicine, and Ponce Medical School in Ponce Puerto Rico. The team was outstanding. Since the NIH project, VIVO has transitioned to a sponsored project of Duraspace. They have been good partners.

Since 2009 the software was significantly expanded. We started a conference series, we held implementation fests, created training camps. VIVO spread to over 150 schools around the world. VIVO is freely available, open source software for representing the scholarship of institutions. It is institutionally-based. Each school makes its own decisions about how VIVO will be used and what will be represented. VIVO is not like Facebook -- a large centralized site run by a company and selling advertising and your data. VIVO is a collection of VIVO sites, just like the world wide web is a collection of independent web servers. VIVO is a semantic web application, based on an open ontology. That takes some getting used to, but the results are well worth the learning.

VIVO has open work groups that you can join. See the project description to the right on this page. And VIVO is always looking for sponsors. For more information on all things VIVO, see the the project web site.

About the Author

I started programming computers in 1971. I like it. I got a PhD in Statistics because I liked math and it turned out I really liked data. As a biostatistician at the University of Florida I helped many people design experiments, collect and analyze data. I always felt that the software I wrote was a first draft, an act in trailblazing. Others would come along to rewrite, remodel, and build operational practices. I've been an IT Director and later a CIO. That was fun. We got a lot done. I was the technical lead for the PeopleSoft implementation at UF. That was also great fun. Large scale project management and leadership is a blast. In 2010 I joined the Clinical and Translational Science Institute at UF as Chief Operating Officer and then co-director. The mission there is to improve human health by increasing research capacity and accelerating the translation of research findings into improved care and health. What could be better. In March of 2015 I retired from the University of Florida and became the VIVO Project Director at Duraspace. I like to plan and organize. I really like working with people -- one on one, in small or large groups, in big teams. I like to teach and present. I don't like conference calls much -- that's a shame, since so much of the modern world seems to think that conference calls are a method for getting work done. My VIVO page has additional details.