IRIS 0.3 Now Available as Open Source

The IRIS Semantic Desktop is now available under an LGPL license.

February 11, 2006

IRIS is a research-quality semantic desktop marrying an ontology knowledge base, robust third party apps (e.g. Mozilla), and an extensible machine learning framework. We are pleased to make this project available for the first time under an open-source LGPL license, and hope it will provide the semantic information and machine learning communities with a powerful new research platform

Release 0.3

IRIS 0.3 has focused primarily on infrastructural improvements. Several highlights:

• Plugin Framework: We moved from our own custom plugin framework to Spring, which is supported by a larger community.
• Knowledge Base: The KB for IRIS is now stored in JENA, improving the query language and overall flexibility of the architecture. Optimizations were performed to make this switch acceptible. Full-text search (lucene) has been seamlessly integrated with relational query. Integrated learning algorithms can now be granted their own KB for storing hypotheses, rather than being forced to write unvalidated hypotheses to a single global KB. Transactional POJOs are now supported, allowing the developer to control when data is written and where it is written to.
• Learning Framework: Classifiers are now declaratively configured in Spring XML configuration files and classifier declarations support SPARQL for member set specifications. This allows adding or changing suggestions classifications without requiring any programming. Clustering is now declaratively configured in Spring XML configuration files making it very easy to add new clustering algorithms. The UI for a clustering algorithm's runtime parameters can be fully configured in XML without requiring any programming. Clustering and results analysis is supported for any text document and a new text extraction package can be used to extract text and metadata from .doc, .pdf, and .ppt files.
• Instrumentation & Automation: A new ontology-based event framework allows for instrumentation events and automation tasks to be linked directly to objects in the knowledge base. Events and tasks are defined in a centralized event ontology and can be dispatched both internally in IRIS and externally to other components via the new Pub/Sub Messaging framework.
• IRIS UI: We have added a few new "themes" to IRIS, focusing on better management of screen real-estate. We also fixed several important bugs. Still much to do here...
• Performance: We now measure the performance of IRIS and generate weekly reports on startup and shutdown time, execution speed, memory, and file space usage. For this release, we have made a number of improvements in each of these areas, but we are still far from "commercial quality".

More details are in the release notes.

Status

In spite of an advanced version number, IRIS is a research platform, and very much a work in progress. If you have low expectations, you will be impressed! If you expect a commercial-level product, you will be disappointed. With the help of the open source community, we intend to continue improving IRIS and taking it in new directions.

We wanted to get the binaries, source code, and documentation to you as soon as possible, which we're sure you appreciate. A number of developer resources (e.g. mailing lists, JIRA, CVS access) are still being moved over from our CALO infrastructure, but we'll get to those soon, and announce them on our news feed (RSS) when ready.

Currently, IRIS runs only under Windows XP. Most of the code is platform-independent, so other operating systems could be supported in the future.

User Documentation

The IRIS User Manual is available here. We will soon announce an archived user-oriented mailing list.

Download

An installer containing IRIS 0.3 can be accessed from the download page. "Bleeding-edge" nightly builds will also be available.

Source Code

A full IRIS source package can also be accessed from the download page.

Developer Support

Initial developer documentation is available. Additional developer resources, including JIRA issue tracking and archived developer mailing lists, will be available soon.

Contact

If you have questions, issues, or problems, please contact us.