Resumen de VIVO: connecting people, creating a virtual life sciences community
Janet McCue, Kathy Chiang, Brian Lowe, Brian Caruso, Jon Corson-Rikert, Medha Devare
To help faculty, researchers, and students in the life sciences discover common interests and make connections, the Cornell University Library has created a virtual life sciences community that uses an entity-relationship ontology model to organize and present information on people, research, and education activities. This single point of access for scholarly activity in the life sciences at Cornell ¿ VIVO (http://vivo.library.cornell.edu) ¿ transcends campus, college and department structure to provide Cornell faculty, students, and administrative and service officials, prospective faculty and students, external sponsors, and the public an integrated view of the life sciences at Cornell. At the request of university administration, the VIVO database is currently being augmented to provide similar content for the social sciences, engineering, physical sciences, international activities, and potentially other areas at Cornell.
VIVO's search engine clusters results into categories ("People", "Activities", "Events", "Organizations", "Publications", etc.), providing a campus-wide search capability that offers a richer context than typical undifferentiated text-based indexes. Each page in VIVO presents bi-directional hyperlinks to any related entities, giving users access to a web of content that might otherwise necessitate discovering and visiting multiple websites. VIVO draws on content from across the university through automated ingest of core university human resource and grants information, subscriptions to licensed and public domain publications databases, department or college faculty reporting mechanisms, and manual curation. The underlying ontology model organizes information at a granular level by type ("entities") and relationship ("properties") to present, for example, faculty profiles with affiliations to departments, fields, or research units, research projects, courses, seminars, and facilities relevant to life scientists regardless of the campus, college, or department in which the entity resides.
