The Indiana University (IU) has announced that it has received more than $1.8 million from the US’ National Institutes of Health (NIH) to collaborate on VIVO, a $12.2 million, seven-university project designed to network researchers around the country. While the proposed new networking system will contain authentication mechanisms to protect sensitive data and intellectual property, it is being described as a Facebook for scientists.
IU's portion of the project is led by Katy Börner, Victor H. Yngve Professor of Information Science and director of the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center at IU. Co-investigators with Börner at IU are Ying Ding, an assistant professor of Information Science, and Robert McDonald, associate dean for library technologies at IU and associate director for the Data to Insight Center at the Pervasive Technology Institute.
Börner's team at the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center will conduct research and development on data analysis and visualisation. Ding will be responsible for ontology development and McDonald will be in charge for the implementation of VIVO at IU. VIVO is a networking template currently deployed at Cornell University. It seeks to bring together publicly available information on the people, departments, graduate fields, facilities and other resources that collectively make up the research and scholarship environment in all disciplines at Cornell.
The Cornell VIVO software is projected to offer IU significant opportunities for advancing enhanced data mining capabilities towards discovering semantic relationships among faculty research. This applies to data both within the IU system and in external comparison to other research institutions that also use the software.
As it is currently envisioned, the system will federate information about faculty and staff from institutional repositories, listings of published articles from academic publishers, and researchers would provide information regarding their own interests. Users will still view the information on what looks like regular web pages, but VIVO is designed to then collect the facts a researcher wants and then assemble a unique page.
Also involved in the project, in addition to IU and Cornell, are the University of Florida, Weill Cornell Medical College, Washington University in St. Louis, the Scripps Research Institute and the Ponce School of Medicine in Puerto Rico.
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