Extending VIVO Ontology to Represent Research and Educational Resources in an Academic Biomedical Informatics Department

The increasing need for interdisciplinary team sciences makes it vital for academic research departments to publicize their research and educational resources as part of “linked data” on the semantic web to facilitate research networking and recruitment. We extended an open-source ontology, VIVO, to represent the research and educational resources in an academic biomedical informatics department to enable ontology-based information storage and retrieval. Using participatory design methods, we surveyed representative types of visitors to the department web site to understand their information needs, and incorporated these needs into the ontology design. We added 114 classes and 186 properties to VIVO. Generalizability and scalability are the measures used in our theoretical evaluation.