On May 7 - 8th, I attended the inaugural meeting of the Concept Web Alliance [2]. CWA wants to enable interoperability between large triple stores like the Large Knowledge Collider [3] (LarKC) and provide an Open Access mechanism for accessing the triple stores. This is great for the projects in life sciences as the semantic triple stores are becoming the de facto way to store data for gene expression and sequencing, biobanks, etc.

Yesterday, we migrated PLoS Biology [6] to the Ambra/Topaz platform [7]. This completed a two year, 5 journal, ~9000 article migration involving many of the PLoS staff. Now all of the PLoS journals have the same feature set including notes, comments, ratings, article impact metrics, etc. Migrating all of the PLoS journals to a single platform is a major milestone for PLoS and will allow us to finally create cross-journal features such as cross-journal search.

A number of factors contributed to the long outage today. The outage was caused by the sabotaged fiber-optic cable lines San Jose [10]. This affected the network traffic going to United Layer [11], our co-location facility. United Layer is supposed to have a redundant network line for failover in case something like this happens. I don’t know the details, but this redundant network line wasn’t working. Their engineers finally rerouted their customer’s traffic around the San Jose disruption at 1:43pm PST.

Tonight, we upgraded the PLoS journal websites to Topaz 0.9.2. This release is chock full of user interface changes and enhancements. We've completely redesigned the article page to accommodate new features and give a better visual experience to the user. Since this is a significant design change for the article layout, we'd like to hear from our users. Email us [14] or reply to this blog post and let us know what you think about the changes.

At 5pm PST, we will update the PLoS journal websites to Topaz 0.9.1. [17]. The journal websites will be offline for approximately one hour. Once the upgrade is complete, the websites will be a bit slow for the first couple of hours while the caches re-fill. We will run scripts before go-live to re-fill the caches for articles linked from the homepage and the current issue, so the most recent articles should display quickly to the end user.