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Add connections blog post
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mconlon17 committed Sep 5, 2017
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<a class="navbar-brand" href="/">Some VIVO Things</a>
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<li><a href="/data">Data In</a></li>
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<a href="#" class="dropdown-toggle" data-toggle="dropdown">More <b class="caret"></b></a>
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<li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/VIVO-Scholarly-Networking-Discovery-Synthesis/dp/1608459934/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1391973550&sr=8-1&keywords=vivo+conlon">The VIVO Book</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Semantic-Working-Ontologist-Second-Edition/dp/0123859654/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1391973643&sr=8-1&keywords=semantic+web+for+the+working+ontologist">The Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist</a></li>
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<li class="dropdown-header">Some VIVO sites</li>
<li><a href="http://vivo.ufl.edu">University of Florida VIVO</a></li>
<li><a href="http://research-hub.griffith.edu.au/">Griffith University Research Hub</a></li>
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<li class="dropdown-header">Related CTSA projects</li>
<li><a href="http://research.icts.uiowa.edu/polyglot/">CTSAsearch</a></li>
<li><a href="http://ctsaconnect.org/">CTSAconnect</a></li>
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<h1>Some VIVO Things Blog</h1>
<p class="lead">Musings on the ecosystem, community, software, data, use, and whatever else comes to mind.</p>
</div>

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<div class="blog-post">
<h2 class="blog-post-title">Connections</h2>
<p class="blog-post-meta">July 6, 2017 by <a href="http://vivo.ufl.edu/individual/mconlon">Mike</a></p>
<p>When I first saw VIVO, I was struck by the simplicity and power of its connective nature. Anything could be connected to anything through the elegant syntax of the semantic web. Over the years, there has been a focus on "profiles" -- assemblies of works of individual scholars, in formats that resemble department web pages, or curriculum vitae, or biosketches. This focus has created a perception that VIVO is a profile system. That's unfortunate.</p>

<p>VIVO can display profiles, and there is great value in using an open source, semantic web application to display profiles. But VIVO is much more than a profile system. VIVO creates an integrated "graph" of the entities it represents. Graphs are the natural structures for representing connections. Triples are the natural means of representing graphs in computers.</p>

<p>What connections are of interest? A simple, but perhaps not very useful answer is "all." We want to know which people used what resource. We want to know which grants funded what datasets. We want to know what events exhibited which presentations.</p>

<p>Suppose we wish to make connections between six kinds of things -- works, people, datasets, grants, organizations, and people. We can, of course, imagine other kinds of things we might wish to connect -- events, resources, locations, time periods, and so on. For six kinds of things, there are 15 kinds of pairs of things -- grants and people, works and datasets, plus the six reflexive pairings -- people to people, works to works, etc.</p>

<p>We can start to think of the kinds of connections there might be between various kinds of things. Consider people and grants. We have a person funded by a grant. A person is the principal investigator of a grant. A person might follow a grant, in the way a person might follow another person in social media. There could be many types of connections between people and grants. Each can be modeled in VIVO.</p>

<p>We can start to think of a thing and the types of connections that thing might have to other things. Consider a publication as a thing. The publication is connected to a journal, to its authors, to a time of publication. The publication is connected to its publisher through its journal, to various organizations through its authors, to a full text representation in a repository, to metrics regarding its use, possibly to grant funding, to software and datasets, to concepts, and to other publications through references and citations. In other words, the publication is a node in a connected graph consisting of other elements of scholarship.</p>

<p>Some connections have their own data -- data about the connection itself. A person has a position in an organization. The position is a connection between the person and the organization indicating employment. The employment has a time period, and a title. The position typically has a type. Each of these pieces of data are about the connection between the person and the organization.</p>

<p>Each connection is recorded as data in VIVO. VIVO has data about the connected things, and the nature of the connection between the things, and data about the connection between the things. Of all of these, the person has a bit of a special place in a VIVO. There has been more effort put into representing people and their connections, and more effort in displaying people and their connections. This is the so-called profile, and leads to the characterization of VIVO as a profile system. But underneath, VIVO is a connected graph, and we can have any amount of detail we wish about any of the elements of the graph.</p>

<p>What if we made profiles of events rather than people? What would an event "profile" look like? What information do we want to see? How far into the graph of connections would we reach? Are there important connections between events? Between events and other things in the connected graph of scholarship? What would we be able to know that is difficult to know now? The same questions can be asked of any of the graph entities.</p>

<p>What are the connections of interest? What connections are already in VIVO and which should be added? What is missing in order to make the connections of interest? If we had the connections we need, how would we use them to better understand and use the scholarship of our organization and of the world? What tools and capabilities would we create?</p>

<p>In future columns, I'll share some thoughts about these questions. Please share your thoughts with others. It is through sharing that we will grow our understanding of the utility of connections, and of what we must build next.</p>


</div><!-- End Post -->

<p class="blog-post-meta"><a href="the-vivo-conference.html">Previous Posts</a></p>

</div><!-- End the blog-main -->

<div class="col-md-3">
<div class="sidebar-module sidebar-module-inset">
<h4>About VIVO</h4>
<p>Vitro is an open source, semantic web application for organizing information.
VIVO is used by academic institutions to represent the scholarly work
of their faculty, staff and students. See <a href="http://vivoweb.org" class="btn
btn-xs btn-info">the
VIVO Project Web Site</a> for more info.</p>
</div>
<div class="sidebar-module">
<h4>Archives</h4>
<ol class="list-unstyled">
<li><a href="an-expert-finder-for-vivo.html">March 2014</a></li>
<li><a href="ctsa-social-network-analysis-at-sunbelt-xxxiv.html">February 2014</a></li>
</ol>
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<h4>Elsewhere</h4>
<ol class="list-unstyled">
<li><a href="https://github.com/mconlon17">GitHub</a></li>
<li><a href="http://twitter.com/mconlon17">Twitter</a></li>
<li><a href="http://facebook.com/mconlon">Facebook</a></li>
<li><a href="http://vivo.ufl.edu/individual/mconlon">VIVO</a></li>
</ol>
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<footer>
<p><a href="http://vivo.ufl.edu/individual/mconlon">Mike Conlon</a>, 2017. Licensed under
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike
3.0 Unported License</a>.<br/>
VIVO is a project of <a href="http://duraspace.org">Duraspace</a>.
Visit the <a href="http://vivoweb.org">The VIVO Project Web Site</a> and
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4 changes: 2 additions & 2 deletions blog/is-vivo-fair.html
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Expand Up @@ -173,7 +173,7 @@ <h2 class="blog-post-title">Is VIVO FAIR?</h2>
principles and consider how VIVO can be improved and how your data practices can be improved to
further the goal of VIVO data as FAIR data.</p>
<p>There is more that VIVO can do to improve VIVO's data as FAIR data. We are all learning how
to be FAIR. I think VIVO Is doing well and can do better.</p>
to be FAIR. I think VIVO is doing well and can do better.</p>
<p>So perhaps a short working answer to "Is VIVO FAIR?" is: 1) the VIVO project supports the FAIR
data principles; 2) the VIVO ontology is a strong element of VIVO which supports the FAIR data
principles; 3) the VIVO software provides features which support the FAIR data principles;
Expand All @@ -190,7 +190,7 @@ <h2 class="blog-post-title">Is VIVO FAIR?</h2>
sharing data even more natural?</p>
</div><!-- End Post -->

<p class="blog-post-meta"><a href="the-vivo-conference.html">Previous Posts</a></p>
<p class="blog-post-meta"><a href="connections.html">Previous Posts</a></p>

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