Originally, it was developed by Aduna (then known as Aidministrator) as a research prototype for the EU research project On-To-Knowledge. Now, it is further developed and maintained by Aduna in cooperation with NLnet Foundation, developers from Ontotext, and a number of volunteer developers who contribute ideas, bug reports and fixes.

Sesame has been designed with flexibility in mind. It can be deployed on top of a variety of storage systems (relational databases, in-memory, filesystems, keyword indexers, etc.), and offers a large scala of tools to developers to leverage the power of RDF and RDF Schema, such as a flexible access API, which supports both local and remote (through HTTP or RMI) access, and several query languages, of which SeRQL is the most powerful one.