To address the very diverse and still developing requirements of maintaining and managing a growing collection of data on "Engelandvaarders" (people who escaped from the occupied Netherlands to England during the Second World War to continue the fight against the Germans), a flexible data model was proposed, built on semantic triples. This approach was expected to result in a) an enduring ability to deal with new categories of resources b) a very significant reduction – after initial development - of the need for work on database interfaces, both for data entry and for data viewing and c) creation of a portable, platform independent and application independent dataset. These results were achieved, and in addition it was discovered that the semantic approach notably improved communication on the metadata requirements within a varied group of stakeholders, volunteers and developers. Finally, visualization benefits were expected, but the actual results surpassed those expectations.