Looking for an alternative to Siderean Seamark

A few weeks ago the website ErfgoedPlus was launched.


This site tries to open up the collections of cultural heritage artifacts in the provinces of Limbourg, Flemish-Brabant and the city of Louvain in Belgium with more to come.

The software used behind this site is Siderean Seamark and was implemented by Amplexor.
Unfortunatily Siderean ceased operating last December while never having finished and/or polished the latest release 4.6.
Seeing no future with this product anymore, we are looking for a potential replacement.

Before we go into that, it might be good to elaborate on the reasons why Seamark has been choosen 3 years ago now.

The client wanted an ontology aware system that could reason and that was strong in two areas:

• offering faceted navigation to be able to drill down into the collection using metadata such as creator, style, material and other properties of relevance for cultural heritage artifacts.
  
  Note: An interesting article on which facets to use for the exploration of such artefacts was published recently.
  
  This filtering should offer more advanced queries using OR, AND, NOT operators, drill-down over hierarchical facets (province -> city -> area)
  
  and using attractive widgets such as maps, timelines, graphs, charts, ...

• offering what was called pivoting; meaning that you could search/navigate to a subset of a certain type of entity, e.g. styles -> styles used in the 18th century -> styles used in the 18th century in the scandinavian countries. Once the subset defined, the focus could switched then to another type of entity, e.g. cultural heritage artefact that have as property style one of the "styles used in the 18th century in the scandinavian countries".
  
  This is similar to what Freebase Parallax offers and calls "Set-based Browsing"; something that generated a lot of excitement in the Linked Data world some months ago.
  
  

Three years ago Seamark offered all those features; even the set-based browsing (meaning years before the Parallax hype); but to our surprise this killer feature was left out in the latest release.
So what you see at http://www.erfgoedplus.be/ shows only a portion of what we wanted to achieve.

We need to move on and look for an alternative that can address the initial requirements.

Alternatives ?

These are the products we want to evaluate during the next months:

1. ARC, Trice, Paggr of Semsol
   ARC being an RDF Toolkit and SPARQL API built on top of PHP/MySQL.
   Trice being a semantic web application framework using ARC.
   Paggr a linked data application built with Trice.
   
   
   ARC is already well established, while the others will be released any day now.
   These products are in open source.
   There are no out-of-the-box faceted navigation widgets yet, but those could easily be added according to Benjamin Nowak, the CEO of Semsol.
2. Virtuoso 6 of OpenLink Software.
   Virtuoso is a swiss army knife; it is a SQL store, a XQuery store, a RDF triple store with SPARQL endpoints, a WebDAV server ...
   It is heavily used in the Linked Data space and version 6 will come with faceted navigation functionality built-in.
   An updated Virtuoso 6.0 Technology preview release is to be expected this week.
3. conStruct of Structured Dynamics
   An open source structured data integration platform for data management, full-text and faceted navigation, built upon VOS (Virtuoso Open Source), Apache solr and Drupal with other triple stores and cms's to follow. To be announced any day know.
4. Anzo on the web of Cambridge Semantics
   Cambridge Semantics offers the Anzo Data Collaboration Server as the main component of their solutions. With Anzo on the web you get a client side browsing environment that the user allows to create customized views of the data with faceted browsing as main filtering technique.
5. talis Platform from Talis
   The Talis Platform is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform.
   For data made available according to the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and/or Creative Commons CCO License the company Talis offers the Talis Connected Commons Scheme, where they provide for these types of datasets free hosting until a certain limit, access services with (faceted) search and a SPARQL endpoint.
6. Topbraid Ensemble/Live from TopQuadrant
   TopBraid Live being an enterprise application platform for implementing and deploying dynamic model-based applications.
   TopBraid Ensemble being a web-based application assembly toolkit for rapidly creating dynamic business applications using Flex/Flash. No faceted navigation facilities yet however.
   
   

If you see other possibilities, please let us know.
I'll keep you current on what we find out during our evaluation.

Anyhow it also shows that Siderean Seamark was way ahead of its time; unfortunatily this turned out to be too early.