Challenges and opportunities of using VIVO as a reporting tool
Christian Hauschke
Graham Triggs
Tatiana Walther
10.6084/m9.figshare.6820217.v1
https://figshare.com/articles/poster/Challenges_and_opportunities_of_using_VIVO_as_a_reporting_tool/6820217
<p>Due to a number of state and federal regulations and other
obligations, publicly funded institutions in Germany have to fulfil a
variety of reporting duties. One example of such a regulation is the
guideline for transparency in research in the German federal state Lower
Saxony. This guideline frames, which information about third party
founded research projects has to be made publicly available by the
universities in Lower Saxony. Besides the federal bodies, there are also
German governmental and European funding agencies like Leibniz
Association, European Commission, German Research Foundation (DFG,
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) which demand reports about staff,
research activities, infrastructure, and other information.</p><p>Compliance
with certain standards is another key feature for reporting. For
example, the German Science Council asks research institutions to
collect research information according to defined standardized criteria
(Research Core Data Set, KDSF). The TIB transformed the data model of
the KDSF to make it usable in VIVO. CERIF is another standard of high
importance for German research institutions.</p><p>The Technische
Informationsbibliothek (TIB) – German National Library of Science and
Technology has decided to use VIVO for reporting. In the scope of
VIVO-KDSF project, an internal VIVO is going to be used for generation
of reports in accordance with the KDSF. This poses some technical and
ontological challenges to a standard out-of-the-box VIVO.</p><p>To allow
the use of VIVO in such a context, it has to comply to a set of laws,
rules and regulations, e.g. regarding privacy, and protection of
employees. These require some information to be visible only to specific
user groups. Furthermore, to achieve a high quality of research
information, there is a need for validating and editing workflows. To
establish these workflows, some developmental work on VIVO has to be
done. This includes amongst others an advanced role and rights
management and a tool to track changes and who's responsible for them.</p><p>On
the technical side, for report production a reporting module integrated
into VIVO is needed. For now VIVO is not technically geared for
reporting, as its basic goal focuses on information representation in
the web. VIVO provides a SPARQL query editor which can be used for
reports, but it requires deep knowledge of SPARQL and the VIVO data
model. a convenient reporting component should include a user interface
which can be intuitively operated by administrative staff, normally not
familiar with SPARQL. The user interface should offer a number of
options to set a single report and offer export of data in different
formats like CSV and PDF. Visualization of data in charts and diagrams
has to be provided as well. </p><p>This poster describes the
developments (to be) conducted at the TIB, and the challenges, it has
been facing concerning the use of VIVO for reporting.</p>
2018-07-16 14:27:56
vivo18
kibana
SPARQl
VIVO
Computer Software