[2] Heurist was originally designed by Ian Johnson (from 2005) and developed by the (now disbanded) Arts eResearch unit (AeR) at the University of Sydney.

Heurist has the following field types, all of which can have multiple cardinality: Heurist provides several modes of data visualisation and export based on filtered subsets of the database: export in CSV, JSon, XML, KML, GeoJSon, GEFX for Gephi, IIIF manifests; tabular listing; user-defined reporting using Smarty; interactive maps and timelines (items with geographic or time fields); simple network diagrams; crosstabulation.

Databases can be populated through form-based data entry, CSV import via a wizard which matches existing records and normalises data by extracting and linking entities based on selected columns, Zotero bibliography synchronisation, KML import, media uploads and indexing.

XML output can be transformed through XSLT stored in records within the database (temporarily unavailable, due to be reinstated 2022).

Heurist was conceived as a digital knowledgebase for managing heterogeneous data with rich interlinking, in small to medium collections (typically <500K records), often rich in media, textual and categorisation data, such as those typically found in the Arts and Humanities, and in personal research spaces.