Thursday, April 14, 2011

University of Florida's VIVO running 1.2 SDB

We did it, after a couple of late nights and alot of planning, the University of Florida's VIVO is running 1.2 in SDB. SDB, or Sparql Database for JENA, has been best described to me as Jena's second iteration on semantic data stores. The first iteration, RDB, stored two tables for every model, one for general statements and one for reified statements. The SDB focuses on a single table for all triples. Main model triples are stored in "Triple" while named graph triples are stored in "Quad". We're very excited to see the new performance with VIVO 1.2. You can see the site here, vivo.ufl.edu.

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Harvester Webinar: 1st Presentation


Today was the first day of the Harvester Webinar's. We've got about 34 people scheduled, and they evenly split between Tuesday 11am and Wednesday 1pm EST. The webinars are about 2 hours long, focusing on the basics of setting up the Harvester Library and using building a script for harvesting people and publications into VIVO.

Tuesday's webinar was well attended, 7 non-harvester team connections were watching the webinar with several of the connections have 2+ people. Alot of great questions and good feedback. Primary concerns seem to be performance and perhaps usability/accessibility. We'll be addressing these over the next 3 iterations as we begin to integrate with the VIVO code base for User Interfaces. We'll be posting everyone's questions and posting a copy of the webinar on vivo.sf.net very soon.

Monday, April 11, 2011

Fitness like a geek


I've read all kinds of storied about geeks finding new ways to fitness. My favorites are the stories about people building fitness devices that power their game playing. Treadmills that move WoW characters, bikes that power game systems. Its all about being healthier while staying true to your self.

Tonight I embark on exercising with my Xbox using "My Shape, fitness evolved". I loved the Wii fit, but pulling that balance pad out all of the time has gotten to be annoying. Now that I own a Kinect, its time to try out the camera for fitness. Desiree has already used it and its supposedly a very good workout. Here goes nothing.

VIVO in the Open



The VIVO project has always been "open source". However, as the project progresses we are moving from just "open source" to "open source open development". This is not a simple tasks, with openness brings concerns of accessibility. Many projects are open source and open development, but some lack the tools to enable passerby's to become engaged in their project.

What do we need to do to be open and accessible? Open information? A team at the UF Libraries is migrating data from Cornell's confluence and UF's redmine to the sourceforge wiki. The JIRA ticketing system used by the VIVO teams has been opened for anonymous viewing. Open Communication? VIVO has its an IRC channel on freendode, #VIVO. We also have open listsservs on sourceforge that are archived so anyone can read and search.

All of these open avenues help us as a project be more accessible, but that doesn't mean the information is easily accessible. It will be interesting in the next few weeks, months, even years as the project grows. What is required to make our project more accessible? Is it better organization, better tools? Only time will tell.