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.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 10 Jul 2026

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 uses the VIVO Ontology (an OWL ontology that imports BIBO, FOAF, and several other vocabularies) to express research-information facts as RDF triples in a triple store, with a Java web application providing the user interface and SPARQL endpoints for federated querying. VIVO instances at participating universities can be harvested into the VIVO Search service (VIVO Search) and into wider linked-data graphs. VIVO is one of the principal open-source CRIS-style platforms and is influential in the linked-data-for-research movement.

References

Krafft D.B. et al., 'VIVO: Enabling National Networking of Scientists', Proceedings of Web Science Conference, 2010.
LYRASIS, 'VIVO' (duraspace.org/vivo).

Machine-readable encodings

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="VIVO"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/vivo" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@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"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-07-10T02:06:20",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}

Referenced across the research world

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