figshare: Publishing Linked Open Data about University Scientific Outputs using the VIVO Ontology

"Initiatives promoting that institutions open their data are starting to have impact and slowly but consistently, as reported for instance by the World Wide Web Foundation in its Open Data Barometer . This is also reaching universities, especially public universities, which under budgetary constraints must transparently show where resources are spent and what results are being obtained.  In many cases, as in the one reported here, all the data is already available but scattered across different information systems and databases controlled by different institution units and using different vocabularies and custom terms. Therefore, the first step in order to provide an integrated view of all this data is to define a reference vocabulary.  Universitat de Lleida, a Spanish university, is currently undergoing this Linked Open Data publishing process of all its the research outputs. This includes papers, research projects, patents, grants, PhD thesis, etc. Given the broad range of entities under consideration, many of the evaluated reference vocabularies failed short in their coverage and required the combination of many different vocabularies, with the consequent integration burdens at the conceptual level ..."