VIVO: A Semantic Portal for Scholarly Networking Across Disciplinary Boundaries

The world of scholarship is changing rapidly. Increasing demands on scholars, the growing size and complexity of questions and problems to be addressed, and advances in sophistication of data collection, analysis, and presentation require new approaches to scholarship. A ubiquitous, open information infrastructure for scholarship, consisting of linked open data, open-source software tools, and a community committed to sustainability are emerging to meet the needs of scholars today. This book provides an introduction to VIVO, http://vivoweb.org/, a tool for representing information about research and researchers -- their scholarly works, research interests, and organizational relationships. VIVO provides an expressive ontology, tools for managing the ontology, and a platform for using the ontology to create and manage linked open data for scholarship and discovery. Begun as a project at Cornell and further developed by an NIH funded consortium, VIVO is now being established as an open-source project with community participation from around the world. By the end of 2012, over 20 countries and 50 organizations will provide information in VIVO format on more than one million researchers and research staff, including publications, research resources, events, funding, courses taught, and other scholarly activity. The rapid growth of VIVO and of VIVO-compatible data sources speaks to the fundamental need to transform scholarship for the 21st century.