This paper describes our experience developing a semantically-rich exploratory interface that integrates a suite of Newsfilm media sources and associated information. Indeed, the affordances for real time, direct manipulation queries provided by the UI have driven the engineering challenges to support such queries across the network. In this paper we review our efforts first to use strictly semantic web technologies, then hybrid database with semantic web wrapper technologies, and now, ultimately, standard database technologies for real time dynamic queries. We consider how the lessons learned about performance design to support such rich queries will need to be addressed in semantic web technologies in order to better support this kind of semantic exploratory experience across distributed data resources.
Daniel A. Smith, Alisdair Owens, m. c. schraefel,