Arkestra: semantic information publishing for organisations

How should a CMS best publish information for an organisation?

Arkestra's approach is to create a semantic model of the organisation and its activities.

I'll discuss:

• how this thorough-going semantic modelling makes possible the notion of an information-driven - rather than merely a data-driven - web publishing system

• how Arkestra uses of data relationships intelligently to inform as much of its output, and to save as much of the user's time, as possible

• how applications like Arkestra's can use django CMS's excellent publishing and site management frameworks

• how not thinking about databases and models is an excellent way to solve the problem of combining rich, useful real-world modelling with flexible, portable information structures

• the amazing Semantic Presentation Editor, that makes it possible for users to create complex page layouts freely, without the constraint of predefined templates or knowledge of HTML/CSS, and without producing abominably-structured HTML

• how Django and Arkestra have worked for us, our team of 40+ web editors and our 10'000 or so pages of information