An Organization Ontology for VIVO based on ROR

Michael Conlon

• Keywords: ontology, peristent identifiers, organizations, information representation
• TL;DR: A new ontology (ORG) is being developed for the VIVO community based on ROR data
• Abstract: Representation of organizations is a fundamental component of representation of scholarship -- research outputs are produced by people associated with organizations, people have credentials issued by organizations. VIVO currently represents organizations using a collection of classes and properties which are in need of revision and improvement. An ontology using Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as an upper ontology, and conformant with Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) development principles is needed to standardize the representation of organizational data in VIVO. ROR (Research Organization Registry) is an open, CC0, curated collection of information regarding research organizations in the world. ROR issues a ROR Identifier for each organization. ROR data is easily represented using the Organization Ontology (ORG) being developed for VIVO. This presentation will include discussion of current VIVO representations, previous work to represent organizations in the OpenVIVO project, Wikidata, the W3C ORG ontology, organization representation in OBO ontologies, and data coming from ROR.