Abstract In this paper we describe the process of mapping researcher information from the Dutch National Academic Research and Collaborations Information System (NARCIS) to the VIVO ontology. Our goal is to use the VIVO ontology to accurately represent these researchers and their organizations, while remaining true to the native language and structure of the Dutch university. To achieve this, we first created an extension ontology to account for differences in the Dutch naming structure and differences in university position description and alignment. Secondly, through the use of language attribute tags, we recorded data in both English and Dutch to achieve better access by both the native Dutch population and the larger English based research community. Finally, we leveraged the SKOS ontology to take advantage of a classification structure, already created by NARCIS, to describe researcher expertise uniformly across the system.