VIVO and Profiles RNS, Sharing Applications as Well as Data through ORNG

The University of Wollongong is using ORNG/OpenSocial applications to add additional content to their VIVO installation, which is planned to go public in May. This represents the first production VIVO instance to adopt ORNG, and demonstrates the value of the research networking community to not only share data across platforms due to the adoption of a common VIVO Linked Open Data standard, but to additionally share applications across platforms that conform to the ORNG/OpenSocial standard that UCSF introduced into the research networking community.

Within their VIVO implementation, the University of Wollongong is enhancing the standard profile by enabling the addition of YouTube and Twitter content feeds along with Slideshare profile links by adopting ORNG gadgets built by UCSF on Harvard Catalyst Profiles[1] . Additionally, the University of Wollongong has developed their own ORNG gadget to display LinkedIn content, which is now being adopted by UCSF for local use and to be available for other ORNG compatible research networking sites such as Harvard, Baylor and Boston University.

ORNG applications are well suited for bringing in content and “grey literature” that is hosted at external web sites. The grey literature is typically faster to show a researcher's latest work than a publication or citations, and also often more consumer friendly than formal research outputs such as peer reviewed publications. As such, grey literature can provide valuable content for research networking systems.

The researchers at our institutions recognize the value in external collaborations. This is reflected in the publications and grants that we represent in our VIVO based systems, and is part of why it is important for us to adopt a common data representation with our research networking tools. The research networking community also recognizes the need to collaborate at a larger scale, and the ability to share applications across our systems is an easy way to strengthening the collective value of our research networking systems.