VIVO 1.13.0 Release Candidate 1 available for community testing

[Dragan Ivanovic]

The VIVO 1.13.0 Release Candidate 1 is available for community testing

For instructions, please visit https://wiki.lyrasis.org/display/VIVO/Release+Testing+-+1.13.0

We will be testing this release candidate until 19 June 2022.  Please consider helping to test: community involvement in the testing process is critical, especially for ensuring a smooth upgrade process for existing VIVO sites.  See the release testing page above for links to forms where you can submit your findings directly.  Any parts of any of the forms that you are able to fill in will be greatly appreciated by the development team.

What's New in 1.13.0

Uploading of files associated with individuals in VIVO

Adds an option for uploading a file and link it with an individual in VIVO. For instance, it might be associated with a book (http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/Book). The associated file might be deleted by user with appropriate privilege (administrator or self-editor), or downloaded by a visitor. It is possible to configure allowed MIME types and maximal file size.

Password authentication on external smtp servers

VIVO can be configured to send email using an smtp service of customer choice.  Prior to VIVO 1.13.0 it wasn't possible to set up a non-standard port of SMTP server, neither username and password for SMTP authentication. Since 1.13.0, it is possible by configuring runtime properties email.port, email.username, email.password.

Please find out how to do that at the minimum configuration wiki page.  

Additional features to the SPARQL Update API - Add POST body support

The API supports sending data via an 'update' parameter. Prior to v1.13.0, this was the only method of sending SPARQL update data. Since 1.13.0, VIVO also supports sending data via the POST message body. To use this method, you must set the request content type to application/sparql-update. This method parses the data as an input stream and may offer a performance improvement for large amounts of data. 

Online translation editor

Adds option for VIVO and Vitro localization on website with downloading results in .properties file. This should simplify process of Vitro and VIVO interface translation. A VIVO administrator can enable online translation checkbox in Developer's panel. After that, an online translator panel will appear at the left side of the screen with extracted all labels of the certain page. The translation of those labels can be entered in input fields and at the end the user can export translations in a form of a property file. 

Localization for the Russian language and for the Serbian Language

The VIVO 1.13.0 has been extended to support Russian and Serbian localizations. Hopefully, this will improve popularity and adoption of the platform in Russia and Serbia. 

Deletion of individuals and linked objects

Adds functionality to delete individuals and specify SPARQL Query to also delete individual dependent objects. This is some form of controlled cascade deletion.

For the complete list of issues resolved, see https://wiki.lyrasis.org/display/VIVODOC113x/Release+Notes#ReleaseNotes-ResolvedIssues

[Dragan Ivanovic]

The VIVO 1.14.0 Release Candidate 1 is available for community testing

For instructions, please visit https://wiki.lyrasis.org/display/VIVO/Release+Testing+-+1.14.0

We will be testing this release candidate until 10 March 2023.  Please consider helping to test: community involvement in the testing process is critical, especially for ensuring a smooth upgrade process for existing VIVO sites.  See the release testing page above for links to forms where you can submit your findings directly.  Any parts of any of the forms that you are able to fill in will be greatly appreciated by the development team. Thanks to TIB, there is also a VIVO instance for testing available at https://vivo.tib.eu/vivorc/

What's New in 1.14.0

Simplified process for installation and customization

The VIVO-languages and Vitro-languages projects are not needed anymore for the installation of VIVO (or Vitro). Customization of UI labels can be specified in local custom ttl files by using private-use language subtags (such as de_DE_x_tib, or fr_CA_x_uqam). Those changes can be made in separated directory in VIVO_HOME, which won't be affected (deleted, overwritten) by any further upgrade of VIVO to newer version. 

Eliminating language specific FTL files

Phrases sensitive on gender and plural-related transformation of words, and other variations related to other morphological changes in different languages have been replaced with more generic changes insensitive on those linguistic transformations. This eliminates need for some language-specific FTL files, especially in the case of loading data from the graph, and improve user-experience.  

Simplified process of supporting new languages

Up to VIVO 1.13.0, adding of a new user interface language required changes in VIVO-languages and Vitro-languages projects in different directories for web application property files and for data which should be preserved in graph. Moreover, it required changes of couple Maven specific files (pom.xml), meaning it required a technical person included in the process of adding new language. Starting from the VIVO 1.14.0, adding of new language can be performed by a translator requiring only a basic knowledge of the ontology notation. 

Improvement of performance for startup of VIVO

The operations of loading and removing sample data, adding and removing model, clearing statements have been improved more than 5 times comparing to VIVO 1.13.0 and prior versions.  

Faux data properties

Besides support faux object properties, VIVO from 1.14.0 also supports faux data properties. 

For the complete list of issues resolved, see https://wiki.lyrasis.org/display/VIVODOC114x/Release+Notes#ReleaseNotes-ResolvedIssues