It has been an open free software project since October 2008, but the project began in 2000, and was initially developed by Logilab[5] for internal uses such as intranet, bug tracker and forge applications.
The framework is entirely driven by a data model. Once the data model is defined, one gets a functional web application and can further customize the views (by default it provides a set of default views for each type of data).
A cube is a reusable component defining specific features. For example, a cube forge allows one to create one's own forge and the forge cube reuses the cubes comment, file, email, etc. Interesting general purpose cubes include dbpedia and openlibrary.
The framework has been translated to English, French, Spanish and German (April 2011).
^Simon, A., Wenz, R., Michel, V., & Di Mascio, A. (2013). Publishing Bibliographic Records on the Web of Data: Opportunities for the BnF (French National Library). In The Semantic Web: Semantics and Big Data (pp. 563-577). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.