IOP Publishing Cuts Costs and Increases Efficiency
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Country
- United Kingdom
Product
- MarkLogic
- Oracle
Tech Stack
- Java
- XQuery
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Database Management & Storage
Applicable Industries
- Education
Applicable Functions
- Product Research & Development
Use Cases
- Digital Twin
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
About The Customer
The Institute of Physics (IOP) is a scientific society of over 40,000 physicists and physics enthusiasts. IOP advances physics research, applications, and education. As advocates for science, IOP educates policy makers and the public about the importance of physics. The institute’s nonprofit publishing arm, IOP Publishing, produces its own scientific journals. Through its website, IOP Publishing also distributes a vast and evolving portfolio of content including journals, magazines, community websites, and conference proceedings. Always striving to increase accessibility to vital scientific content, IOP Publishing is a partner to the science community. IOP Publishing is a global distributor of scientific content with more than 50,000 users across the world submitting one million page requests each day.
The Challenge
IOP Publishing, a global publisher and distributor of scientific publications, was facing challenges with its legacy solution built on Oracle and Hibernate. The eight-layer stack required a multi-step process to take unstructured content, like journal articles, from ingest to delivery. This often resulted in multiple versions of content in different locations that created a mismatch between versions. Valuable time was lost tracing back to the source; this directly affected the scientists and other users who rely on the IOP platform as a vital research tool. To provide the best service to its user community, IOP Publishing wanted to overhaul its biggest platform, IOPscience. With a limited budget and a mandate to switch systems with no downtime, the IOP Publishing team knew it couldn't rebuild the system from the ground up with traditional technology.
The Solution
The IOP development team set about on its own to migrate from Oracle to MarkLogic section by section. Team members began by looking through the documentation, and experimented with small proof of concepts to boost their confidence. Then, by attending the MarkLogic User Conference, they learned how easy it would be to change schemas and add flexibility to their system. The team continued its education on the MarkLogic Community. a site for developers, students, and enthusiasts which includes free software, tutorials, screencasts, videos, demos, discussions, and contests. The team found the MarkLogic Community blog especially helpful with specific examples from seasoned developers. For example, a single blog post led the team to best practices for coding that drastically sped up IOP queries. As the developers learned the system, they began migrating content from Oracle to MarkLogic. They started with the landing pages for articles, working on just the bibliographic information. From there, they took on the task of representing entire articles. Now, the team is moving entire journals over one by one.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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