Some VIVO Things Blog

Getting Started

February 8, 2014 by Mike

I've never done a blog before, so please bear with me. Seems like there's a lot to share about happenings in the VIVO community, tools development and data management.

I'm particularly interested in data. For VIVO, it's usually data about scholarship -- representing scholarly activity in all its forms. At the University of Florida (UF for short), we have started with basic data -- people and their departments, grants and their investigators, papers and their authors, courses and their instructors. As others have found, institutional data can be messy, or flat out missing. I'll share experiences about data in blog posts to come.

To get data in to VIVO, you'll need some tools. As delivered, VIVO does not have simple tools that can take your institutional data and load it into VIVO. UF has built some tools that you may find useful. We'll talk about those tools in the blog, and have them available on the "data in" section of of this site.

Once you have data in, you'll want to use it. After all, isn't this why anyone would go to the trouble to put in any computer system? Using VIVO means seeing the data. VIVO comes with profile pages, some navigation aids, and some simple visualizations. But there is quite a lot more that you will want to do. UF has built some tools for seeing the data in VIVO -- additional visualizations, inspectors, reports, and graphs. We build these tools outside of VIVO. That is, we build the tools using lightweight technology independent of VIVO. This makes the tools easy to use on any VIVO. As we mature, we expect that you will be able to use our tools by merely "pointing" them at your VIVO, that is, you won't need to run any local software at all. Just access our existing tools.

Here I'll be writing (blogging?) about what we've done, the tools we've created, and tools we are creating to make use of the data in VIVO. I'll point at the repos of the software.

I hope you find something useful.