A 2009 National Institutes of Health grant funded the development of an online community to support collaboration among scientists across multiple disciplines. The result is VIVO, an emerging national network of scientists from government, private and acacemic institutions.
The two year grant has already resulted in an annual VIVO conference. The next is scheduled for August 24 – 26, 2011 just outside Washington, DC.
According to the VIVO website:
The National Network enables the discovery of researchers across institutions. Participants in the network include institutions with local installations of VIVO or those with research discovery and profiling applications that can provide semantic web!-compliant data. The information accessible through VIVO’s search and browse capability will reside and be controlled locally, within institutional VIVOs or other semantic web-compliant applications.
VIVO is an open source semantic web application originally developed and implemented at Cornell. When installed and populated with researcher interests, activities, and accomplishments, it enables the discovery of research and scholarship across disciplines at that institution. VIVO supports browsing and a search function which returns faceted results for rapid retrieval of desired information. Content in any local VIVO installation may be maintained manually, brought into VIVO in automated ways from local systems of record, such as HR, grants, course, and faculty activity databases, or from database providers such as publication aggregators and funding agencies.