UF receives $12.2 million to establish national network of ...(eir interests. Although users will still...)

"The Semantic Web is a collection of facts, rather than pages. It is really for computers to search and find things and present them in a reasonable way," Conlon said. "It's a next-generation type concept."

The idea for a database of researchers first sprouted at UF when two librarians at UF's Marston Science Library proposed using Cornell's VIVO software at UF to help scientists better find research articles published by UF faculty members.

Touted as a research discovery tool, VIVO is open-source software that allows people to search all publicly known information about a specific topic or researcher in one site. On Cornell's VIVO site, a search for the word "cancer," for example, yields dozens of results, but they are broken up into categories like "people," "opportunities" and "topics." Clicking on "topics" takes one to another set of subgroups that allows searchers to more quickly find exactly what they want.

"I saw the power VIVO had to show the research coming out of an institution," said Valrie Davis, a UF outreach librarian for agricultural science who teamed with UF librarian Sara Russell Gonzalez to propose using VIVO at UF after seeing it presented at a conference. "VIVO is an open source tool to connect people with common research interests. It's going to link people together. I think that is the most important part of this grant."

The grant supports a National Institutes of Health goal to establish a national network of scientists. The NIH also wanted such a network to contain verifiable data. Using VIVO was a perfect fit, Conlon said.

"Five years of time, energy and imagination created VIVO, and now that work is paying off in ways we had only imagined before," said Anne R. Kenney, the C
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