Is presentation and institutional branding really more important than Linked Research Open Data?

A presentation given by Jonathan Breeze & Alex Viggio at the VIVO 2014 conference in Austin, TX.

Abstract:

Despite the best efforts of VIVO’s growing community of developers, researchers and data scientists, today’s leading research institutions continue to spend significant sums of money and time developing and implementing static academic profile pages which lack the research discovery capabilities found in the VIVO linked open data platform. Symplectic has been an active member of the VIVO community for several years, and in 2013 shared an open source extension to the VIVO Harvester project to help streamline the VIVO implementation process for research institutions by generating VIVO RDF from its Symplectic Elements platform. Symplectic continues to support the adoption of VIVO by its institutional clients but in 2013 saw one of its clients elect to replace their public VIVO instance with a home-grown Content Management System due to concerns over the presentation of data to visitors of the their VIVO site. In 2014, Symplectic launched an internal pilot project to explore how they might extend other aspects of VIVO 1.6. A second pilot project was also undertaken to understand how Symplectic’s earlier VIVO integration could be re-purposed to provide support for passing Elements data to Profiles RNS implementations. In this session, the presenters will explore lessons learned from the past few years of engagement with the VIVO project, attempt to explore the reasons behind the continuing trend for selecting CMS styled profile solutions and present the findings of their recent VIVO 1.6 and Profiles RNS 2.x pilot projects.