Semantic Enhancement Server (SES) has proven very useful as a way of enabling user interaction with the Semaphore models outside of the Semaphore environment - enhancing user interfaces and providing content for downstream systems - and we will continue to make it available as long as it is wanted by customers.

However, it does present a view of the model that is different to how the model appears in Semaphore (it is based on a zthes thesaurus model rather than the SKOS-XL model that Semaphore actually uses). Many customers would also like a way to download larger data loads (sometimes the entire model, and this can be with large models) and SES was not really designed for this use case (it can be done, but usually at the expense of assigning a large amount of memory to the SES process).

We have therefore built the Concepts Server as a more modern high-availability read only version of the model. This is backed by a MarkLogic database giving us the full range of the search capabilities of that DB. It allows data to be returned as JSON only, but it does allow you to select which data you want returned (you do not need to get the full concept information if you only want the preferred labels), it is better designed for streaming large sections of the model and it has graphql and Swagger interfaces in addition to the REST API.