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Is VIVO Fair?
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<h1>Some VIVO Things Blog</h1>
<p class="lead">Musings on the community, software, data, use, and whatever else comes to mind.</p>
<p class="lead">Musings on the community, ecosystem, software, data, use, and whatever else comes to mind.</p>
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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>
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<h2 class="blog-post-title">Is VIVO Fair?</h2>
<p class="blog-post-meta">August 27, 2017 by <a href="http://vivo.ufl.edu/individual/mconlon">Mike</a></p>
<p><i>NOTE: Apologies in advance. This post is a bit longer than I would like, and contains some unavoidable technical
terms. I have tried to provide citations for each term, recognizing that this will further lengthen the reading
for some. I felt it was better to address this topic in one post rather than break it in two. I hope that is
good for all.</i></p>
<p>The FAIR data principles (https://goo.gl/MFTfC6) developed by Force 11 (https://www.force11.org)
are increasingly popular and provide a means for assessing whether data is being shared in a
useful manner for others.</p>
<p>VIVO sites produce data in the form of assertions about the connected graph of research and
scholarship. How does VIVO stack up against the FAIR data principles?</p>
<p>Findable. VIVO data is quite findable. VIVO includes schema.org tags (http://schema.org) on
its pages to improve search engine finding. VIVO has a registry of sites
(https://goo.gl/9Thaa8) with URLs for the sites. VIVO sites can participate in Direct2Experts
(http://direct2experts.org/), another finding tool. VIVO site data is aggregated by CTSAsearch
(https://goo.gl/Du3Fwn), yet another finding tool. OpenVIVO (http://openvivo.org) provides
its data as constantly updated text files on the web. These files are very easy to find using
a search engine (hint: search for "OpenVIVO data"). And with the addition of Triple Pattern
Fragments (TPF) (https://goo.gl/k1BtFQ), in the next release of VIVO, I expect additional tools
to be developed to find VIVO data. The future is bright to further improve "find ability" of
VIVO data.</p>
<p>Accessible. If people can find your VIVO data, can they access it? The answer is yes. VIVO is
designed to share its data. Every page in VIVO can be accessed as HTML, which browsers use to
render the page for humans to read, and as RDF (https://www.w3.org/RDF/), a machine readable
data format for computers to read. This is one of VIVO's strongest features, and one of its
biggest secrets. Programmers can access VIVO's data starting from almost any page in VIVO,
because VIVO provides a connected graph of scholarship and research. Starting at a person, one
can find papers, leading to co-authors. Starting at an organization, one can find people who
have positions in the organization. Starting at a grant, one can find the funding agency,
investigators, and so on. VIVO makes traversing the graph straightforward.</p>
<p>Additionally, sites may export their data to files accessible on the Internet, as OpenVIVO does,
or provide a SPARQL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARQL) endpoint. The TPF feature in the
next release of VIVO will make VIVO data even easier to access.</p>
<p>Interoperable. VIVO data, modeled using the VIVO ontology, is amazingly interoperable. Two sets
of VIVO data can be combined simply by putting them in the same file. No other work is needed.
All VIVO sites and sites exporting VIVO data (there are many) are fully interoperable. They
share the same data format (RDF) and the same representation/vocabulary (The VIVO Ontology).</p>
<p>Interoperability is lowered when sites do not use the same version of the VIVO ontology. While
each version is a valid representation of scholarship, the ontology currently does not provide
equivalence between versions. This must be done by software attempting to use multiple versions
of the ontology. Future work may lower the effort currently needed to use multiple ontology
versions.</p>
<p>Interoperability can be lowered when VIVO sites extend the ontology in custom ways to represent
additional elements in VIVO, or to represent elements that should be common and in the ontology.
The VIVO community needs to work with sites to identify elements that should be in the common
ontology to avoid such customizations.</p>
<p>Similarly, interoperability can be lowered when sites use custom vocabulary to represent
research concepts. The VIVO community needs more work to develop best practices for
presenting the concepts underlying research areas of scholars, and subject areas of their
works.</p>
<p>Reusable VIVO data, modeled by the VIVO ontology, achieves the highest standards for
reusability. VIVO data is "Five Star Linked Data (https://goo.gl/GRN1RV)," a term coined by
Tim Berners-Lee. (https://goo.gl/rrjzmZ). VIVO data is 1) on the web; 2) machine readable
structured data; 3) uses a non-proprietary format; 4) published using open W3C standards; and
5) links to other open data. Anyone on the Internet can reuse VIVO data.</p>
<p>And yet, there are things we can do to improve reusability. We can clarify the license under
which sites provide VIVO data, and provide that information with the data. We can clarify
where sites obtained their data and provide that information with the data. VIVO's current
practice is to "inherit" provenance information from the source providing the information --
that is, if the data came from site x, we currently assume site x provided the data. We can
go further and assert such facts explicitly in the VIVO data. We currently assume that VIVO
data is provided by each site in a manner that supports reuse with attrbution. We can clarify
this by providing a license assertion in the VIVO data.</p>
<p>Each VIVO site determines for itself how best to meet the FAIR data principles, if at all.
Some sites share their data freely, while others rely on the delivered VIVO software to share
their data. Still others have their data behind firewalls, preventing sharing. Unshared data
cannot be FAIR.</p>
<p>Each of the FAIR data principles has sub-headings providing further guidance regarding what it
means to be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. I urge you take a look at the
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>
<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;
and 4) VIVO sites provide VIVO data and each can share data according to the FAIR data
principles.</p>
<p>If you are involved with a VIVO site and are non-technical, you may wish to discuss with your
technical staff how your site is addressing FAIR data principles. If you are at a VIVO site
and are technical, you may wish to speak with the non-technical members of the team regarding
how your site should address FAIR data principles. Working together, sites should be able to
align their practices with their institutional requirements and with the FAIR data
principles.</p>
<p>What do you think? What more can the VIVO project do to promote data sharing using the FAIR
data principles? What features could be added to the ontology or to the software to make
sharing data even more natural?</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>VIVO is an open source, semantic web application for organizing information.
VIVO is often 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>
</div>
<div class="sidebar-module">
<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>.</p>
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 <a href="https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/VIVO">The VIVO Wiki</a>
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