The Semantic Web on Your Desktop -- Open IRIS Announced
Following in the footsteps of Douglas Engelbart's pioneering work, SRI has announced the upcoming open-source (LGPL) release of Open IRIS -- an experimental Semantic Web personal information manager that runs on the desktop. IRIS was developed for the DARPA CALO project and makes use of code libraries and ontology components developed at SRI, and my own startup, Radar Networks, as well as other participating research organizations.
IRIS is designed to help users make better sense of theirinformation. It can run on it's own, or can be connected to the CALOsystem which provides advanced machine learning capabilities to it. Iam very proud to see IRIS go open source -- I think it has potential tobecome a major platform for learning applications on the desktop.
IRIS is still in its early stages of evolution, and much work willbe done this year to add further functionality, improve the GUI andmake IRIS even more user-friendly. But already it is perhaps the mostsophisticated and comprehensive semantic desktop PIM ever created. Ifyou would like to read more about IRIS, this paper provides a good overview.
Congratulations to the team at SRI for reaching this important milestone!
(Note: IRIS is a product of SRI. Radar Networks helps to developIRIS, under subcontract to SRI, but our primary work is on our owncommercial products, which have not yet been released, and which arenot related to IRIS. Stay tuned.)
