Correction Appended.
The University will switch research databases to a system called VIVO, an open source web application with powerful search features that allows for easy retrieval of information about academic scholarship. Implementing VIVO will facilitate information exchange about research at the University while also forging national connections to researchers at other institutions using the system, wrote Clyde Briant, vice president for research, in an email to The Herald.
"Brown is going to use VIVO as a database for researchers at Brown," Briant wrote. "Our current database has limited and outdated searching capabilities." The Office of the Vice President of Research, Computing and Information Services and the Library are leading a joint effort to implement VIVO by the end of 2012.
"One of the perennial problems at research institutions is that it's very difficult to know what people are doing on site," said Kristi Holmes, the national outreach coordinator for VIVO. "VIVO is making that easier at institutions. It's easier to find people and resources, and it's easier to get together and build teams."
VIVO is not a database of academic documents or research results. Instead, it allows for easy retrieval of relevant information around a topic, said Jon Corson-Rikert, head of Information Technology Services at Cornell. For example, if you searched "cancer" on the VIVO website, you would get information about who is researching cancer, where it is being researched, the names of articles about cancer, but none of the actual research or articles. Professors searching for collaborators, funders searching for researchers with specific skills and students searching for graduate school programs would all benefit from its functionality, according to VIVO's website.
VIVO was created in 2003 when Cornell faculty realized the many people working in the molecular biology genomics area were scattered across about 30 different departments throughout campus, said Kathy Chiang, head of services for academic programs and the project leader of VIVO at Cornell.
In order to find information about these faculty - such as the classes they teach, their titles and previous and current research projects - someone conducting a search would have to understand the hierarchical structure of the university well enough to know where to look on the website, Chiang said. As a result, many faculty members were frustrated because they could not find people working on related research in their own disciplines, let alone other areas of study, she said.
Cornell faculty created VIVO to address this concern.
VIVO uses innovative methods for storing and searching for information to discover research and scholarship. The application classifies information into categories including people, courses and locations, said Corson-Rikert. VIVO also stores information about the relationships between data using subject-predicate-object triples that computers can read, according to VIVO's website. For example, information about an article titled "Paleontology Today" by John Smith would be stored in VIVO as "John Smith-is the author of-Paleontology Today."
"(VIVO) captures relationships among people, organizations, research activities and outcomes in ways that enable searching content within each page but also the connections of each page to others," Corson-Rikert said.
VIVO also differentiates itself from other similar applications that rely on users to add information, which allows for human error, manipulation of data and the use of unverified sources, Holmes said. In contrast, VIVO is able to add information automatically to its database using trustworthy sources such as human resource departments of academic institutions and university course listings, she added. While it does allow for user maintenance and input, VIVO does not depend on it nearly as much as other applications, according to its website.
VIVO has grown to considerable size since 2003. It has seven official partner institutions and many unofficial implementations scattered around the world, Holmes said. Because VIVO is open source, anyone can look at the source code for the application and implement it on their own. The VIVO organization is aware of roughly 50 implementations in the U.S. and at least 25 implementations and related projects internationally, but Holmes said there could be many more quietly using the application.
An article in Wednesday's paper ("New research database to aid collaboration," April 4) stated that leaders of VIVO are aware of 20 to 30 implementations around the world. In fact, VIVO is aware of more than 50 implementations in the U.S. and at least 25 implementations and related projects internationally. The Herald regrets the error.
