Open Research Networking Gadgets (ORNG).

In 2009, UCSF embarked on a journey to utilize industry-backed application standards to extend our research networking tool of choice, Profiles, into a software platform. The goal of this work was to bring extended data and functionality to our researchers’ online environment and make it easier to share independently-developed software innovations with others. We used the OpenSocial standard to achieve these ends. In 2012 we extended the OpenSocial standard to support RDF and the VIVO Ontology in an effort titled “Open Research Network Gadgets” or ORNG. Our work has been adopted by two major academic open source research networking tools – Harvard Catalyst Profiles and VIVO, and the ORNG standard is now available for use by the 50+ institutions that use recent versions of the two software products.