VIVO Searchlight is a small app that automatically shows you VIVO profiles related to the page you're reading.

The app works as a bookmarklet, so there is nothing to install. Once you've added the bookmark, simply click it whenever you're reading an interesting article online.

The real magic happens when you begin highlighting text inside the article.

Add the bookmark

Click and drag this button to your browser's Bookmarks Toolbar:

VIVO Searchlight

Note: If your browser's Bookmarks Toolbar or "Favorites Bar" is hidden, look under the "View" menu for an option to unhide it.

Some browsers, including recent versions of Firefox, do not allow bookmarklets to be dragged into a toolbar. In that case you can right click the button and add it as a normal bookmark.

VIVO Searchlight does not yet function properly with Internet Explorer 9 and below

About

VIVO Searchlight is powered by Searchlight, an application development framework created by Rob Agle as an extention of Miles Worthington's winning app entry at the 2011 VIVO Conference call for apps. Using the Searchlight framework, developers at any organization with a VIVO database can quickly and easily deploy a searchlight app of their own.

The application framework was written entirely in Javascript, with server-side functionality built on top of node.js. The demo was built against the Apache Solr search index powering VIVOsearch.org. The application has also been successfully deployed using ElasticSearch.

A number of excellent open source projects have been used:

Searchlight in the Wild

Aside from this demo, the Searchlight framework has been used to successfully deploy a proof-of-concept Searchlight app for the AgriVIVO project, a collaboration between Cornell University and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N.

While searchlight is already fully-functional, there is plenty of room for improvement. In particular, the algorithm used for matching text to VIVO profiles needs further tuning. In the meantime, Searchlight may occasionally yield odd results.

Developers

For more information about using the Searchlight framework to deploy your own Searchlight app, check out the source code on GitHub or have a look at the documentation. Note that Searchlight is still a prototype under active development.

We gladly accept pull requests if you discover any issues!