One of the the most interesting developments around VIVO is the coordination with other international initiatives trying to set standards for both describing experts / researchers and their research activities and uniquely identifying them across systems.

At VIVO 2012, Laurel Haak presented ORCID, the international, non-profit project providing a global registry of unique identifiers for researchers (with automated linkages to their research activities whenever possible). ORCID is directed by a Board comprised of fourteen members of the global scholarly research community (from institutions such as OCLC, CERN, Elsevier, Thomson Reuters, Harvard University, Cornell University...). Haak explained how the creation of the researcher ID and the claiming mechanism work  (“from experience, you cannot really disambiguate without the individual actually claiming a record”) and how their objective is that ORCID becomes embedded within research workflows.

The launch of ORCID is planned for next October and in the first phase it will be a public registry open for individual registration with an API available for trusted organizations for creating batches of IDs. Integration with other partners’ services is foreseen: among  initial partners for integration, Thompson Reuters.

Although ORCID still has to be launched, VIVO is already considering ways of interacting with it.

Also at VIVO 2012, Jon Corson-Rikert (VIVO Cornell), David Baker (CASRAI), Keith Jeffery (euroCRIS) and José Salm (Lattes, Brazil) presented the latest developments in aligning models between VIVO and other initiatives trying to set standards for describing experts / researchers and their research activities: namely, CERIF, CASRAI and Lattes.

As for CERIF (a standard model for describing researchers' CVs and research activities recommended by the European Commission and then entrusted to euroCRIS, a non-profit organization), it is being translated to RDF and a VIVO-CERIF class alignment is taking place within euroCRIS, also in relation to the agINFRA EU project.

CASRAI is another non-profit standards development organization with the objective of creating a common data “dictionary” for describing a researcher and his activities. Such a "dictionary" is meant as something beyond an ontology, as a common way of identifying and describing/naming things across different actors, disciplines and countries: it has a modular structure (levels: common, national, by discipline) and can potentially be translated into an ontology. CASRAI could work as a neutral standard above the different ontologies and could have a role in the development of a  common query specification.

A similar national initiative with which VIVO is also working on an alignment is the Brazilian Lattes patform.

VIVO, CERIF and CASRAI are working together in order to be interoperable and exploit each other’s strengths and they’re also coordinating in advocacy for standards and unique identifiers: URIs in different systems should be mapped and with ORCID as definitive identifiers, the ORCID ID would point to a researcher's several URIs.