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Frequently Asked Questions

Section 1. People's profiles
1.1. Where does my profile come from?
1.2. What can I do if my profile is not in AgriVIVO and I want it to be included?
1.3. How I can modify my profile?
1.4. If I modify my profile in the community from which it is imported, is it automatically updated in AgriVIVO?
1.5. Would it be possible to use my AgriVIVO profile as a "master" profile that can be shared with other communities, so that I just update my profile in AgriVIVO and it's automatically updated in AIMS, IAALD, etc.?
1.6. Why do I see duplicate profiles of the same person? Is it possible to merge them?
1.7. Data in my profile are not exactly the same or are named/grouped differently from my original profile.
1.8. For certain types of categorization, like expertise, there are both synonyms (ontology, ontologies, ontology alignment...) and broader/narrower terms in the same list.

Section 2. Organizations
2.1. Where do the records of organizations come from?
2.2. What can I do if my organization is not in AgriVIVO and I want it to be included?
2.3. How I can modify the record of my organization?
2.4. Why do I find the same organization under different forms of the name? Is it possible to standardize the names of organizations?

Section 3. Events
3.1. Where do the events come from?
3.2. What can I do if an event is not in AgriVIVO and I want it to be included?
3.3. How I can modify the record of an event?
3.4. Would it be possible to have an RSS feed of events from AgriVIVO and/or email notifications for new events?

Section 4. The portal
4.1 Will the portal be multilingual?

 

 

Section 1. People's profiles.

1.1. Where does my profile come from?

Your profile comes from one of the participating communities: if you have a profile registered with one or more of them and if you gave permission to the community managers to share your profile information with AgriVIVO, your profile will appear in AgriVIVO. If you have profiles with more than one community, you will see each profile from each community as a separate profile (see question n. 1.6 to see why).
Each community may have a different way of allowing people to opt in or out of AgriVIVO. Most of them provide a checkbox in members' profile pages to give permission to include one's profile in AgriVIVO. 

1.2. What can I do if my profile is not in AgriVIVO and I want it to be included?

Read our page on Participation.

1.3. How I can modify my profile?

For the moment, you can modify your profile in the original community from which it was imported.
In the next phase we are also planning to find ways to let people update their profile directly in AgriVIVO, since AgriVIVO is capable of collecting more granular information about people's careers and publications. However, we will have to do this without overwriting the profiles coming from the source communities and in turn being able to re-import from data sources without overwriting the AgriVIVO profile. And we will have to find ways to send the enriched AgriVIVO profiles back to the participating communities.

1.4. If I modify my profile in the community from which it is imported, is it automatically updated in AgriVIVO?

Yes, your AgriVIVO profile will be automatically imported the next time data are imported from that specific community. The frequency of imports depends on how often the data providers are sending us the updated exports.

1.5. Would it be possible to use my AgriVIVO profile as a "master" profile that can be shared with other communities, so that I just update my profile in AgriVIVO and it's automatically updated in AIMS, IAALD, etc.?

That's one of the ultimate goals of AgriVIVO: allowing communities to share profile information. Once we allow users to update their profiles in AgriVIVO, the various communities can decide to import that profile, but in order to be able to do that they will have to do programming work on their websites. A first step in this direction will be to provide a widget that, given the ID of a person, returns the HTML of his/her profile: in this way communities can easily display the AgriVIVO profile of a person. But a full integration is something that requires a lot of work on the part of the communities. 

1.6. Why do I see duplicate profiles of the same person? Is it possible to merge them?

Duplicates can be caused by two different factors:
- two records are about the same person, but the data in key fields like first and last name or email was not spelled exactly in the same way: in this case the machine cannot understand that the records are about the same person; if in the future we implement manual data curation and "claiming" of profiles, we can allow people to manually merge profiles;
- two records are about the same person, but they come from different sources: in this case, for the moment we are keeping the records separate, for two reasons: a) keeping provenance information for each piece of information; b) technical issues: the current standard VIVO importers don't allow to merge records from different sources.
The foreseen solution for this is that the importers recognize duplicate records across sources and instead of merging them they link them: all the data from the linked profiles will "appear" to be merged in the way information is displayed, but provenance information will be attached to each piece of information.

1.7. Data in my profile are not exactly the same or are named/grouped differently from my original profile.

Different communities have different ways of managing profile information: what is called expertise in one website may be called interest in another one, what is called type of organization in one may be called stakeholder group in another one: while designing the importing procedures, we tried to match elements that were similar, even if not exactly the same, in order to have as much information as possible in AgriVIVO.
We are working together woth the participating communities to better harmonize the way data are managed.

1.8. For certain types of categorization, like expertise, there are both synonyms (ontology, ontologies, ontology alignment...) and broader/narrower terms in the same list.

For the moment, we rely completely on information imported from the data sources and unfortunately data sources use different words or names for the same things, or use more specific or more general terms. We could merge terms in the search portal, but the next time we import from the sources the data will be overwritten.
Of course this is one of those things that we want to improve with AgriVIVO: we want to improve the semantics that we import from the data sources.
The first thing we are planning is a mapping between keywords used in the data sources and AGROVOC terms, so that the same word is used for the same concept, and once that mapping is ready we'll use it while importing the data. This mapping would also help to group narrower terms under broader ones, exploiting AGROVOC's relations.
This mapping could also be done at the level of the data sources: the data providers are working with us in order to improve the quality of the data.

Section 2. Organizations

2.1. Where do the records of organizations come from?

Records of organizations come from different types of data sources:

a) Communities that provide people's profiles: the affiliation information is used to extract names of organizations and link people to organizations;

b) Databases of organizations: these databases don't contain information on links between people and organizations but they contain detailed information about organizations.

If an organization has a record in more than one of these sources, you will see each record from each source as a separate record (see questions n. 1.6 above and 2.3 below to see why).

2.2. What can I do if my organization is not in AgriVIVO and I want it to be included?

Read our page on Participation.

2.3. How I can modify the record of my organization?

For the moment, you can modify the record in the original database from which it is imported.
In the next phase we are also planning to find ways to let people update data directly in AgriVIVO and then use AgriVIVO as authority data on organizations, but this will require the identification of authorized contact people for each organization.

2.4. Why do I find the same organization under different forms of the name? Is it possible to standardize the names of organizations?

At this stage, we rely completely on information imported from the data sources and unfortunately data sources use different words or names for the same things. We can merge records in the search portal, but the next time we import from the sources the data will be overwritten.
For the second phase, we are planning to introduce a disambiguation algorithm that exploits natural language techniques and tables of variants of names in order to merge records about the same organization under one heading and consider all other forms as variants or mis-spellings.
Such disambiguation is relatively easy with very well known organizations but can be very difficult for small organizations that can have similar names but be based in different countries (like Ministries or Research Institutes), as not all the data sources include the country information together with the organization name.
 
The owners of the data sources are working with us in order to improve the quality of the data.
Once we have a good reliable database of organizations in AgriVIVO, we will develop web services to allow other systems to use it as authority data.

Section 3. Events

3.1. Where do the events come from?

Records of organizations come from platforms that manage events and expose them in machine-redable formats with good metadata (start and end date, country).:

If an event is submitted to more than one of these sources, you will see each record from each source as a separate record. Besides, one of the data sources for events is an aggregator, so if the same event was published in more than one of the aggregator's data providers, the event will appear once for each data provider (see questions n. 1.6 and 2.3 above to see why).

3.2. What can I do if an event is not in AgriVIVO and I want it to be included?

Read our page on Participation. For events, the easiest solution is to publish your event in a platform that registered their event RSS feed with AgriFeeds (www.agrifeeds.org). 

3.3. How I can modify the record of an event?

For the moment, you can modify the record in the original platform from which it was imported. In the case of events coming from AgriFeeds, you will have to update the information in the data source that provides the records to AgriFeeds. 

3.4. Would it be possible to have an RSS feed of events from AgriVIVO and/or email notifications for new events?

We are considering setting up customizable notifications on the portal in the future, so that users can subscribe to different types of notifications. However, we're still not clear as to how much people would like to register an account with AgriVIVO. Besides, dedicated functionalities for events, like calendars and feeds, are better implemented in AgriFeeds, which is completely devoted to news and events.

We will run a poll on this issue before deciding how to go ahead. 

Section 4. The portal

4.1 Will the portal be multilingual?

We will have a multi-language interface (static pages and navigation), but we have to decide how to go ahead with  multilingual data. We don't see an easy way to search multi-language data: the search pages and browsing interfaces depend on the language of the data source: we display data and search "facets" in the language in which we find them In the source. If data in the sources are in different languages:

-either facets will be displayed in all languages and results will be in all languages (but recall will be very poor: clicking on a French keyword will probably find only records in French)

- or we limit the display to the selected language of navigation: you only see facets in the language you selected and you subsequently find only records in that language.

The long-term solution is of course mapping the terms used for facets (e.g. expertise and type of organizations) to a multilingual classification or thesaurus, so that records are associated with a concept rather than with a keyword and in the faceted browsing you will see only the labels of those concepts in the selected language and clicking on one of them will return all the records associated with the concept, in any language. This is for the portal. For the main VIVO instance, VIVO is not fully multi-language at the moment. In phase 2, we'll be collaborating with organizations working on VIVO translations (including IICA for Spanish) to have a multilingual AgriVIVO. Again, even in VIVO, the issue is not just with the interface (that is easy) but with the way you search and display the data (also the labels in the ontology have to be translated).