VIVO 2014 Conference
 
Plan to attend these informative workshops on Wednesday, August 6th! Simply register for them as you register for the full VIVO/SciTS conference.  

Morning Sessions (8:30am - 12:00pm)

An Introduction to VIVO 

Presenters: The VIVO Team

An overview of VIVO designed to help attendees learn how to make VIVO a success at their institution. Topics include: A VIVO overview; case studies of VIVO implementations; adoption and outreach activities; key features of the VIVO ontology and technology; leveraging VIVO with queries, reports, and visualizations; and how to participate in and learn from the VIVO community.

Data Integration: Importing data from external systems into VIVO

Presenters: John Fereira and Brian Lowe, Cornell University Library

Acquiring data from external systems is a fundamental part of installing a faculty profiling system at any institution.  This workshop will offer hands-on interaction with transforming external data into semantic web data using the VIVO-ISF ontology.  It will include overviews of different methods and tools in use across the VIVO community while focusing on the underlying principles of data integration and related best practices.

Research Impact: Evaluation, Metrics, and Altmetrics 

Presenters: Kristi Holmes, Northwestern University, and Paul Albert, Weill Cornell Medical College

There is increasing emphasis on academic campuses and across other organizations to quantify the impact of research output and activities. Analysis of publication data provides a number of metrics to assess productivity and impact of research at various levels: document, source, author, group, and institution. This workshop will provide an introductory-level overview of research impact and discussion of publication data metrics and object-level alternative metrics (altmetrics). A demonstration of resources and tools and discussion of benefits and limitations will be included, including an in-depth discussion of data dashboards for leveraging VIVO-compatible data (e.g. how to launch a dashboard and how to maximize utility of the dashboard for reports, strategic planning, and compliance with open access mandates). The class will conclude with an extended discussion of how to move beyond publication data for assessment purposes, including a discussion of enterprise-level data sources and approaches, social network analysis, and discussion of frameworks for assessing research impact.

Afternoon Sessions (1:00pm - 4:30pm)

VIVO Data Federation and Visualization 

Presenter: David Eichmann, School of Library and Information Science, University of Iowa

This workshop addresses some of the ways in which the value of VIVO-compliant linked open data can be further enhanced through data federation and visualization. Linkage to non-VIVO data sources through external identifiers (e.g., PMIDs and DOIs) is as valuable once a VIVO instance is operational as such sources are in populating that instance. Similarly, stand-alone applications that can interrogate one or more VIVO instances can add significant institutional and community value. We will use the CTSAsearch system as a reference architecture to explore federation and visualization of multiple data sources.

Getting the most out of Profiles RNS 

Presenters: Griffin M Weber, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA; and Eric Meeks, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA

Profiles Research Networking Software (RNS) (http://profiles.catalyst.harvard.edu) is an open source Semantic Web research networking platform based on the VIVO ontology. It has many similarities to the VIVO software, but it also includes numerous unique features. This workshop explains the algorithms used by several of these features and teaches the audience how to configure and extend the Profile RNS platform. The specific topics of this workshop include:
• Pubmed Disambiguation Engine. Profiles RNS uses names, affiliations, and other information about investigators to identify their publications. This service can also be used by other research networking platforms. Learn how to tweak the search parameters to get more accurate results.
• Bibliometric Analysis. Learn how to use bibliometric analysis tools to analyze publication data from Profiles RNS. Concepts such as h-index and expected citation counts will be reviewed.
• Social Network Analysis. Profiles RNS automatically calculates several centrality metrics based on coauthorship relations among investigators. Learn what these metrics mean and how to use them to understand collaboration at your institution.
• Profiles Web Services. Profiles RNS utilizes the VIVO ontology to assign relevance weights and rank search results. Learn how the search algorithm works and the different methods of importing and exporting data to/from Profiles RNS, including RDF crawl, SPARQL, and XML web services.
• Open Research Networking Gadgets (ORNG). ORNG (http://orng.info) combines Linked Open Data and the OpenSocial standard (used by Google, IBM, SciVerse, LinkedIn, and others) to allow social web apps to be added to both Profiles RNS and VIVO. Learn how to add and configure ORNG.

VIVO Apps and Tools 

Presenters: Chris Barnes, University of Florida, and Ted Lawless, Brown University

The VIVO platform has been designed to lower barriers for data interchange and re-use by following standard data formats, ontologies, and identifiers consistent with Semantic Web best practices.  This workshop will highlight the work of the VIVO community’s newest working group to identify tools and applications that work in concert with or alongside VIVO to provide new functionality in ways limited only by developer creativity.  The workshop will present an overview of open source tools for building and populating a VIVO and demonstrate applications ranging from error checking, reporting, and CV generation to novel visualizations of organizational structure, syndication of data to other websites, and opportunities to work with VIVO-compatible data across institutions and software platforms.  No prior knowledge of VIVO or semantic technologies will be assumed, and presenters will highlight opportunities to participate in community evaluation, sharing, and improvement.