Jon Corson-Rikert, Medha Devare, and Brian Caruso will present VIVO, a new CUL service providing "a curated index to life sciences research, transcending academic divides to provide an integrated view of the life sciences at Cornell."

Jon, Medha, and Brian will describe the design, outreach implications, and implementation of VIVO. Jon will focus on back-end components for organizing diverse information and shaping its presentation. VIVO stores content in an ontology, a set of relationships among defined content elements (e.g., people, departments, publications). The ontology can be extended or adapted as the nature and scope of content change.

VIVO currently incorporates several strategies for keeping content updated, including harvesting from online publications databases, data warehouses, Cornell directory information, and faculty reporting. These options will need to be extended and expanded to accommodate the evolving range of information sources at Cornell, including RSS feeds, web services, and other shared data sources.

Medha will address the implications of VIVO as library outreach, providing some perspective on how the life sciences community sees VIVO. She will also discuss the partnerships being created with that community to keep content current.

Brian Caruso will describe his implementation of several of the content integration tools, and his recent work to make VIVO harvestable through an OAI service. He will also present experimental work exporting the VIVO ontology to Protg, a leading open-source tool for ontology development and research.

VIVO is a collaborative effort by the Life Sciences Working Group in the Library, chaired by Medha Devare.

Jon Corson-Rikert has been a senior programmer/analyst in Information Technology Services at Mann Library since 2001, working on projects including VIVO, the CALS research portals, CUGIR (Cornell University Geospatial Information Repository), and E-Clips, a teaching collection of entrepreneurship-related video clips developed in part with CUL support. Prior to joining Mann Library, Jon worked in the Program of Computer Graphics at Cornell and developed digital cartography and GIS software in Wisconsin and Massachusetts.

Medha Devare joined Mann Library as the Bioinformatics and Life Sciences Specialist in March 2004. She has worked on curation, design, and outreach aspects of VIVO and the CALS New Life Sciences research portal. Medha is also involved in Instruction and Reference services at Mann, developing and teaching a class on data mining in bioinformatics, coordinating NCBI workshops at Cornell, and developing a short course for the new minor in Genomics. Before choosing a career in librarianship, Medha was a Research Associate in the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences, conducting research to assess the impact of transgenic crops on soil biology.

Brian Caruso joined Mann Library Information Technology Services in December of 2004 following a move to Ithaca from Cambridge, Massachusetts. His previous work includes projects in radio location and the financial industry.