Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
Cornell University's VIVO instance, the original deployment, exposing thousands of researcher profiles as linked data.
- Is an instance
A research council's VIVO deployment federating researcher profiles across multiple institutes.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A static HTML faculty directory is not VIVO.
- Not an instance
A vendor's proprietary CRIS UI is not VIVO.
Editorial commentary
VIVO is an open-source, semantic-web software platform for representing an institution’s scholarly activity — researchers, publications, grants, courses, and their relationships to one another — as linked data, and for building public researcher-profile and research-network sites on top of that graph. It originated at Cornell University and is today, per VIVO’s own project site (verified directly, 2026), developed and supported by its user community with organisational and programme support from LYRASIS, which absorbed the earlier Duraspace organisation in 2019. VIVO reports 150+ active instances operating in 25+ countries.
How it works
VIVO expresses research-information facts as RDF triples in a triple store, using the VIVO Ontology (an OWL ontology that imports BIBO, FOAF, and several other established vocabularies rather than defining every term from scratch), with a Java web application providing the public-facing profile pages and a SPARQL endpoint for federated, machine-readable querying. Individual VIVO instances can be harvested into VIVO Search and into wider linked-data graphs spanning multiple institutions.
Where VIVO sits among CRIS platforms
VIVO functions as a Current Research Information System for the institutions that run it, and is one of the principal open-source options in that space — see CRIS for the fuller product landscape, including how VIVO compares to DSpace-CRIS (which combines repository and CRIS functions) and commercial products such as Pure and Elements. VIVO’s particular emphasis, relative to those alternatives, is the public linked-data researcher-profile graph rather than internal grant/project administration — institutions frequently populate a VIVO instance in part from ORCID data via the ORCID API, rather than requiring researchers to re-enter the same claims twice.
References
- Krafft D.B. et al., ‘VIVO: Enabling National Networking of Scientists’, Proceedings of the Web Science Conference, 2010.
- VIVO project site, vivoweb.org (LYRASIS-supported open-source community project), verified 2026.
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="VIVO"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/vivo" />{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/vivo",
"name": "VIVO",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/vivo",
"description": "An open-source semantic-web application and ontology developed by the VIVO community (initially at Cornell University, now under DuraSpace/LYRASIS) that publishes information about researchers, departments, publications, grants, and courses as linked open data and as a navigable web interface.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/research-info-systems#set",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/vivo",
"sameAs": [],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"publisher": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
},
"author": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#editorial-team"
},
"datePublished": "2026-05-21T02:13:42",
"dateModified": "2026-08-23T04:43:19",
"inLanguage": "en-GB",
"isAccessibleForFree": true
}
