We started, like many, creating websites backed by a CMS built on top of various flavours of some kind of relational database.
In time, however, a different kind of data management requirement developed, mostly in the cultural and scientific communities. The amount of data is increasingly massive, very dense, and highly connected. These data pools are intended to be publicly accessible, yet they remained mostly in highly confined or at least opaque systems, thus in practice only useful to a handful of specialists.
As a consequence these data pools are very stable, or, in other words, rigid. Interaction as a simple visitor or reader is difficult enough, and the idea of modifying or contributing to the data directly is in most cases completely out of scope.
On the upside, these data itself in these pools are increasingly highly standardised and follow very strict open specifications, to ensure the long lived nature of these data as well as possible inter-compatibility with other institutions, and as a whole with the idea of open data and sharing in mind.
3MS emerged form the idea of a living archive where data bore the characteristics of a long term, highly connected, open and standardised data pool, coupled with all the possibilities, features and interactivity usually expected from a modern Content Management System as found behind most current websites. Using standardised specifications and technologies developed for large archive systems, like RDF and SPARQL, combined with components commonly found in modern web applications, including a fast search index and a REST API, we've managed to bridge the gap between these two paradigms.
Further, an ontology is used not only to define the data that can be found in the RDF graph, but also to define the rules that dictate what and how things can be seen, modified, added or deleted via the REST API, and along which workflows. On top of everything lays a graphical UI for immediate interaction with the content graph as if it were a simple relational database.
Regarding the name: Data in an RDF graph are represented as triples (subject - predicate - object) and our system allows you to manage these triples. Hence 3MS, the Triple Management System.
