There are several small, fast and powerful open source wikis that can be used as a full-featured CMS to for building small web sites and are fairly easy to extend and customize. Some may be capable of providing knowledge representation and management functions as well as the usual features available in traditional wikis. They may be the closest existing solution to some of the requirements for a Semantic Web ( however it gets defined ).

An interesting development - master Smalltalk developers Stéphane Ducasse, Marcus Denker, Damien Cassou, Lukas Renggli, Alexandre Bergel and Adrian Lienhard have initiated a fork of Squeak called "Pharo". If you know the cast of characters in the Squeak world, this is a huge assortment of Smalltalk talent ... huge.

Update: June 20 2008 - Development release of the Rules module ( rules-6.x-1.x-dev ).
Update: July 10 2008 - RPG project

Wolfgang Ziegler has started a project to create a Drupal rules nodule implementing inference engine functionality, tightly coupled to the Workflow-NG module. One presumes that the rules engine will implement forward/backward chaining and be pluggable into the workflow engine.

The wish list includes features such as:

Updated: June 15 2008

There's a minor stampede going on to develop the first working stable CMS based on CakePHP. ( Note added. Jan 21. If so, the stampede is in ultra-slow motion. Not much has happened in the last few months ).

These efforts have been hampered a bit by the 'next release syndrome'. CakePHP version 1.2.x is now moving into the late beta phase and should have a stable release within a few months or so - in fact, the current beta releases are quite usable, even if some of the the new features are not finished.

Revised: Sept 20 2007

After a great burst of initial activity with the NINA project and then with Dan Morrison driving the Relationship Manager project, there was good momentum to semantic web projects for Drupal. But the efforts seem to have gone into something like a hiatus during the the last year or so.

Note: my understanding of these services is evolving and may be incorrect at this point. Updates coming soon probably ...

Of course, the best example of a Seaside-powered site may be the Seaside site itself. But there are several interesting ( and either cheap or free ) hosting sites for Seaside web applications.

Mea Culpa

First, I offer the reader a confession: I gave Smalltalk up for dead ten years ago.

I'm not proud of it. I had a choice between being an advocate of superior software technology or being an up-to-date payer of mortgages. I decided on mortgage payments. In the intervening years of C++, Visual Basic and Java, I didn't look back too much. Other than recalling how I solved a problem in Smalltalk and an occasional bout of Squeak watching, Smalltalk was a thing of the past.

The Oasis standards organization published a Reference Model for SOA ( Service Oriented Architecture ) not too long ago. In it, they compared SOA and OO ( Object-Oriented ) technologies. While I don't agree with them entirely ( or even mostly ) on the strengths and weaknesses of SOA versus OO technology, here is an extended quote of what they have to offer on the subject.