VIVOweb - Facebook for Scientists

I read this week (in a post on DigitalKoans from last week) that the National Institutes for Health (NIH) has awarded a grant of 12.2 million for two years to develop what is being referred to as "Facebook for scientists." Three universities, the University of Florida in partnership with Cornell University and Indiana University, are to develop VIVOweb which will be a social networking software for scientists and researchers. A goal of VIVOweb is to "foster alliances" in hopes of speeding development in biomedical research.

According to the AP press release, presently scientists can use search engines and educated guessing to connect with others needed for their research. The new Facebook-style professional network would use "emerging" Semantic Web technology (hasn't the Semantic Web been supposedly emerging for years now?) to make information from institutions, academic journals, and researchers themselves available to scientists.

VIVOweb will be based on an open-source software developed by Cornell in 2003 called VIVO (which sounds like it should be an acronym, but actually isn't). At Cornell, VIVO is a tool that aids research and discovery by creating a single access point to find scholarly information. VIVO was created to "bring together in one site 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." This technology uses the Vitro integrated ontology editor and semantic web application software, and was created in part to ease the mounting frustrations from Cornell faculty members who had a difficult time finding collaborators in different disciplines across campus because there was no simple, single place to go to look. The VIVO website boasts that users can search the VIVO website to find information about “anything related to academic and research pursuits at Cornell.”

VIVO has since branched out to other institutions.

The VIVOweb project that the NIH is funding for the sciences will use Cornell’s VIVO as a basis to "build a multi-institutional platform for the biomedical community." By creating this multi-institutional Facebook for scientists, VIVOweb will make it easier for scientists to extend their research networks, and to find existing projects or fellow scientists with similar research interests. Cornell will be in charge of developing the multi-dimensional aspect of the project, while the University of Florida will be focusing on creating and developing technology to keep the VIVOweb data current, and the University of Indiana will be responsible for developing the social networking tools that the scientists will need to make VIVOweb useful.

Trying to emulate something as successful and popular as Facebook, but for a more specific purpose, sounds like a pretty good idea. Based on what little I’ve read, VIVO seems like it has been successful and useful at Cornell, so it stands to reason that VIVOweb could be just as successful and helpful to biomedical scientists. I think anything that is designed to help link researchers together, to make it easier to find current projects, and to speed up research and development can only be a good thing – if it works. I’ve blogged about institutions pouring money into other new, developing cyberinfrastrcuture projects before; this is yet another example of having to wait and see what happens. In the meantime, I suppose scientists can always try to use Facebook to network (there are some science groups using it), if they can find the time to do so, in between tending their Facebook farms and cooking in their Facebook cafes.