The VIVO Ontology is an OWL2 ontology for representing scholars, their activities, and institutional relationships as linked data. Developed alongside the VIVO research networking platform, the ontology models the full landscape of academic life: people, organizations, publications, grants, courses, events, and the relationships between them. It is used by universities and research institutions worldwide to create discoverable, interconnected profiles of their research communities.
Background
VIVO originated at Cornell University in 2004 as a project to create a comprehensive directory of researchers across the university. The team recognized that a simple directory was insufficient; they needed a rich data model that could express the complex relationships between people, their research outputs, institutional affiliations, and collaborative networks. The VIVO ontology was developed to serve this need, drawing on existing vocabularies where possible and creating new classes and properties where gaps existed. In 2009, the project received NIH funding to expand VIVO into a national network, which led to adoption at dozens of research universities. Governance later moved to DuraSpace and then to LYRASIS following the DuraSpace-LYRASIS merger in 2019.
Purpose & Scope
The VIVO Ontology provides classes and properties for describing the entities and relationships central to academic and research institutions. It models people (faculty, staff, students), organizations (departments, colleges, laboratories), research activities (publications, grants, patents), educational activities (courses, advising relationships), events (conferences, seminars), and geographic locations. The ontology is designed to be used with linked data technologies, enabling institutions to publish interoperable research metadata that can be aggregated, queried, and visualized across organizational boundaries.
Key Classes
| Class | Description |
|---|---|
| FacultyMember | An academic faculty member at an institution |
| AcademicDepartment | An organizational unit within an academic institution |
| Journal Article | A scholarly article published in a journal |
| Grant | A funded research award |
| Course | An educational course offered by an institution |
| Conference | An academic or professional conference event |
| ResearchArea | A subject area or topic of research interest |
| AdvisingRelationship | A relationship between an advisor and an advisee |
Serializations & Technical Formats
The VIVO Ontology is expressed in OWL2 and serialized in RDF/XML. It reuses and extends several established vocabularies including FOAF (Friend of a Friend) for person descriptions, BIBO (Bibliographic Ontology) for publications, SKOS for concept schemes, and the vCard ontology for contact information. The ontology namespace is http://vivoweb.org/ontology/core#. Institutions deploying VIVO typically store data in a triplestore and expose it through SPARQL endpoints and linked data interfaces.
Governance & Maintenance
The VIVO project is governed as an open-source initiative under LYRASIS. Development is coordinated through a steering group and community calls. The ontology and platform source code are maintained on GitHub under the vivo-project organization. Contributors include developers and ontologists from universities and research organizations. The project follows an open contribution model, and ontology changes are discussed publicly before being merged.
Notable Implementations
Over 100 institutions have deployed VIVO or use the VIVO ontology as their research information model. Cornell University, the University of Florida, Duke University, and Washington University in St. Louis are among the notable adopters. The VIVO ontology has also influenced other research networking systems and is used in national-scale research profiling initiatives. The OpenVIVO project demonstrated cross-institutional aggregation of VIVO data, and the ontology has been adopted in contexts beyond academia for modeling organizational expertise networks.
Related Standards
No directly related standards are currently indexed.