I realize it’s been a while since the Open Repositories conference; I thought that those of us who attended were going to have a debrief and share some of the interesting things we learned about, but that hasn’t happened yet, so I decided I would try to blog about some of the interesting things from my notes.
Introduction to the Topaz Framework and the Ambra Publishing Platform#
Richard Cave from the Public Library of Science (PLos)
view presentation materials: http://hdl.handle.net/1853/28421
PLoS has been using Ambra/Topaz since December 2006, and all of their journals are now on that platform. The original intent was for an end-to-end peer review system with opportunities for post publication, annotations, semantic relationships, etc. The core of it is built on Fedora, used as a blob store; metadata, annotations, etc. are stored as triples in Mulgara.
Topaz is an object triples mapping (like Hibernate ORM) with an objects based query language; this allows for storage & retrieval of files and triples in a single transaction. www.topazproject.org
Ambra is a web 2.0 frontend for Topaz with the goal of turning readers into knowledge contributors. Right now, it can only handle NLM xml; it has no workflow engine or peer review - it is not an out-of-the-box solution. However, features in development are article metrics (impact factor), usage data (views, downloads), semantic enhancement - e.g., highlighting specific terms (proteins, genes, locations, etc). www.ambraproject.org
Potential relevance/applicability for us? The only project that these technologies might fit right now is Molecular Vision, which uses NLM xml. Hopefully, this will also be a good project to keep an eye on as they develop more features and add support for other kinds of content types.