IRIS stands for Integrate. Relate. Infer. Share. For an introduction of what IRIS is and the motivation behind IRIS, see the following paper: http://www.openiris.org/documentation/iris.pdf. This paper gives a general overview of the motivation behind IRIS. However, the architectural details are slightly out of date. The developers guide documents the current IRIS architecture, suplementing the original paper.

IRIS was developed for the CALO project, a DARPA funded intiative to create personal cognitive assistant technology. IRIS is considered the "Platform" part of the CALO project and is maintained by SRI International. The role of IRIS as the "Platform" is a set of tools and building blocks for building assistive technology in the office environment. CALO maintains a "Desktop" set of add-on plugins for IRIS that add intelligence to the system. IRIS itself also comes with some learning capabilities, and is essentially the basic building blocks of the CALO system.

It was decided early in the CALO project to open source IRIS. It is the hope that the core Platform technology will be useful to other researchers and developers. Using IRIS leverages work that would take a long time to develop, and it is also our hope that the community will help extend and add to the IRIS system.

The IRIS Website located at http://www.openiris.org is the primary resource for staying current with the latest documentation and releases. In addition, the IRIS mailing list is the recommended method for posting questions/issues and topics. The mailing list address is <Calo Iris <calo-iris@calo.sri.com>>. To get added to the mailing list, email <support@openiris.org>.