Reusing VIVO Data

VIVO has quite a bit of data about scholarship at the University of Florida. All grants awarded, papers published and courses taught by an university person since 2008 are present in VIVO. VIVO has additional information on presentations, awards, service, and research interests as entered by individuals on their profiles.

There are number of ways to reuse VIVO data. Each is described below.

Use built-in features of the VIVO application

VIVO has several features to make it easy to use data in VIVO:

The Index. Click on "index" in the upper right hand corner. You will have access to all the types of things in VIVO with counts for each. Click on any one of these will provide lists of the things in VIVO. Click to find a paper, a person, a grant, a course, a department, a college.

The Search box. Enter a search term and press search. VIVO lists things that contain the search term. Click on the list at right to narrow down your search to particular types of things. For example, searching for "pulmonary hypertension" produces 21 pages of results. Narrow your search by selecting one of the choices from the little menu on the right -- choices include people, organizations, research, grants and activities. Clicking on research produces 13 pages with additional choices for narrowing selections to Academic Article, Article, Book, Concept, Conference Paper, Editorial Article, Journal and Review.

The tabs. VIVO provides tabs along the top of every page -- Home, People, Organizations, Research, and Events. Click on the tabs to see lists of the kinds of things under each heading. Click on one of the things to get more information about it. Everything in VIVO has a paper, whether its a person, a grant, a course, or some other type of information.

Department pages. Department pages list all the people who have the department as their home department, as well as all people who have one or more appointments in the department. Appointments may be official (time on grant, for example), or unofficial as in director of a program without appointed time in the department.

Organization Temporal Graphs. The temporal graph shows papers and grants for the organization over time and allows comparisons between sub organizations and members of the organization.

Organization Map of Science. The organization Map of Science shows the topic areas for the organizations's papers arrayed on the Map of Science, a visual representation of connectivity between all fields of science.

Personal Co-Author network. Select the co-author network on the right hand side of any person profile. The co-author network shows all person's who have written papers with the person whose profile you are viewing

Personal Map of Science shows the topics of papers published by the person of interest.

Biosketch. A draft NIH biosketch can be created by selecting the "NIH" icon under the person's picture.

CV. A draft CV can be created by selecting the "CV" icon under the person's picture.

RDF. The raw VIVO data for the object being viewed can be downloaded by clicking on "RDF". Resource Description Framework (RDF) is an Internet standard for representing data using controlled vocabularies and ontologies. VIVO uses RDF to represent all its information. For more information on RDF, see the W3C RDF page. For more information on the VIVO information model, see the VIVO Ontology page

Write SPARQL queries

VIVO uses a query language called SPARQL, the SPARQL Query Language for RDF. SPARQL is a very powerful tool for extracting data from VIVO. Using SPARQL, you can get any data from VIVO, into a CSV or JSON format for use by statistical software, spreadsheets, reporting tools, documents, or other programs.

Learning SPARQL requires some background in database queries or other data management software, such as SAS or SPSS. A good reference for SPARQL is Learning SPARQL, an O'Reilly book.

Use existing SPARQL queries

A growing collection of VIVO SPARQL queries are available at Some VIVO Things, a site devoted to VIVO data and software. See Sample SPARQL for queries ready to run.

Write software to redisplay VIVO data

The Clinical and Translational Science Institute has written several small scripts to extract VIVO data and display it on their web site. See Recent Papers by UF Authors -- this script queries VIVO to find all papers by UF authors added to VIVO in the past two weeks that have appeared in journals in the past 90 days, University Centers -- updated from VIVO, this list shows the web site of each center along with the VIVO page of each center, University Institutes -- as with centers, the list is updated from VIVO with dual links for each Institute, and University Core Facilities -- a list of the core facilities of the University of Florida.

For more information about this approach, you may wish to contact CTS-IT.