NYCCSC: Extending VIVO ontology and application to facilitate discovery through Blacklight and to support climate change science content curation
Creators: name: Kahn, Huda
name: -Rikert
name: Branchini, Darcy
name: Zabel, Ingrid
Publisher: name: VIVO
Year: 2015
Subjects: subject: Information Systems
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences
subject: Library and Information Studies
subject: FOS: Media and communications
subject: FOS: Media and communications

description: Currently, the policy makers and associated researchers who analyze the impacts of climate change and formulate response strategies must gather information and data on climate change from scattered and diverse sources. The New York Climate Change Science Clearinghouse (NYCCSC) project aims to provide a central source of climate change science data and information specific to New York State. The NYCCSC application consists of multiple components, including a Blacklight front-end that provides search and discovery functions. This Blacklight instance shares a Solr search index with a VIVO instance used as the main curation interface for the project. This presentation will cover the ontology and architecture used for the project, including the following: <br>- Ontology development: We have extended the VIVO-ISF ontology to represent climate change science concepts and linkages between those concepts and the data and information being represented in the Clearinghouse. These concepts include climate changes, effects of these changes on organisms and built and natural systems, response strategies, and actions to implement these strategies. This project’s use of semantic relationships has helped to expose the connections within the content in a richer way. <br>- Software extensions to support search and discovery using Blacklight and VIVO: As Blacklight expects certain fields and formats from the search index and we needed to display certain information in the user interface, we had to modify VIVO’s search index to enable discovery and display through Blacklight. Furthermore, we had to modify Blacklight to enable querying RDF data directly from VIVO as not all content is included in the search index. In addition, we worked on boosting results for specific classgroups in the VIVO application to prioritize documents, data, and GIS over people, organizations, and events. <br>- VIVO and PostGIS for custom boosting and geographical location representation: The NYCCSC application uses PostGIS for storing geographical information and associations between geographic locations and geotagged items represented in VIVO. We extended the Blacklight front-end to allow the user action of zooming in and out of the map displayed on the search page to update search results based on relevance to the resulting bounding box of the map. To support this geographical search, we extended VIVO’s Solr search with a custom function that utilized PostGIS ranking of items based on a bounding box. In addition, we extended the NYCCSC VIVO instance and utilized VIVO’s built-in N3 editing framework to allow a user to search the PostGIS database for geotagging a particular entity represented in VIVO. <br>- Interface design: As part of this project, we have utilized usability testing and other user feedback to help inform the design of the front-end and the features included in the clearinghouse site. A demo of the site will demonstrate how the different components of the architecture work together to support search and discovery through semantic relationships. <br>Presentation Options: We would prefer the long talk presentation format where we can elaborate on the abstract above but can also utilize the shorter presentation format if necessary.