Public Library of Science

Committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a public resource PLoS is working closely with the Topaz development team on the publishing system that aims to shift the scientific and medical communities from subscription based journals to an Open Access online commons. Topaz is an open source content modeling and storage software framework. Based loosely on the ORM (Object to Relational Mapping) family of software, Topaz has the following aims:
1. Use semantic technologies as the core engine which provides more flexibility than the older relational models.
2. Allow applications to bridge the gap between business objects and the underlying semantic storage.
3. Allow applications to store and retrieve large objects of data via a blob store within the same transactional boundaries.

Fedora was chosen as the content application as it offered an extensible architecture, support for web services and interaction with a semantic repository. For the current release, blobs are stored in Fedora while Mulgara is used as the triple store. Topaz created an Object Triple Mapping (OTM) for retrieving collections of objects in Mulgara. An object query language (OQL) was designed to allow applications to query based on their object definitions instead of the underlying RDF.

Fall 2007 sees the launch of two new projects - a new window on content in the clinical trials field and the arrival of a new journal, PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. The other PLoS journals (Biology, Medicine, Computational Biology, Pathogens and Genetics) migrate to the Topaz platform in 2008.