IRIS Devblog

Now that I’m back from Galway, and survived the Hacker’s Convention in Santa Cruz, California, I think I can speak freely, now, about events which took place during the SemanticDesktop Workshop. There were many presentations, each separately available, all available as one giant download here. For now, I plan to mention two Semantic Desktop platforms that parallel the vision and ideas of IRIS. The first one to talk about is Gnowsis. The second one, Haystack, I’ll talk about in a following post.

Gnowsis is the work of Leo Sauremann, who coauthored an opening paper for the workshop found here. The Gnowsis group are now sponsoring a forthcoming Semantic Desktop Workshop of their own. Read about it here. The event takes place in Berlin, on 9-13 December, 2005 (real soon now!).

What do we know about Gnowsis, looking at it through the lens of an IRIS designer? Firstly, Gnowsis probably predates IRIS, since our first prototype was crafted in late 2003. Secondly, Gnowsis takes a different approach than IRIS to user interface architectures.

IRIS can be seen from the screenshots to be of the single frame architecture, where we mount all applications, from email to calendar to web browsing in one frame. Gnowsis, by comparison, federates individual applications through a control system and browsers which grant views of the growing knowledge base.

IRIS designers are now taking a serious look at such differences, with an eye to a potential redesign of the IRIS interface. I’ll have more to say about that soon.

Filed by park at 11:26 am under IRIS
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IRIS was announced and demonstrated at the Semantic Desktop Workshop in Galway, Ireland, today. There were about 100 people in attendance, and several great questions were asked. Possibly the most interesting question went something like this: “What is IRIS doing about the fact that some people want to use individual applications?”

Let’s examine two interpretations to this question.

One interpretation is that people simply want to use their favored client, say, Eudora or Outlook for email. In order to do that, and remain within the design considerations that animate the IRIS implementation, someone would have to instrument those applications such that IRIS can be made aware of semantic events such as new email arrived, read, deleted, and so forth. IRIS would need the ability to cause such clients to display emails selected by users during other IRIS events, such as selecting an email related to some other activity, say, a project or task. That’s a tall task, instrumenting individual clients. Budget constraints often dictate what goes into IRIS; in the case of email clients, the Mozilla client was chosen for its usability and similarity to most other popular email clients.

Another interpretation is that people would rather not have all their clients loaded in one unified framework, as is presently the case. They would rather have each client available to move around on the desktop, or to close when not needed. That particular interpretation is presently subject to much discussion within the IRIS team. Watch this space for more developments surrounding the second interpretation.

Filed by park at 10:09 am under IRIS
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This post will necessarily be short, simple, and mildly historic in nature, to answer the quesiton: What is IRIS?.

IRIS is a semantic desktop application created by researchers at SRI International and at universities around the United States. IRIS has been created to serve as a user interface and knowledge base for the CALO project. During development, we determined that the IRIS project was based originally on a number of open source projects and could easily be released to the open source community as a complete package. IRIS is, at once, a framework for plug-in applications and services, and a large and growing collection of such applications and services. Of particular interest to developers is the machine learning framework included in the project.

Source code to all components of the IRIS project will be made available following the next milestone build. That build will occur once the latest round of refactoring and cleanup of the source tree has been completed; we expect that to occur in mid January, 2006.

In this blog, several authors will contribute thoughts about the IRIS project, its evolution, the community of IRIS developers and users, and open source technologies in general. We expect to cover topics that include user interface, knowledge representation, machine learning, and more.

Filed by park at 2:15 pm under IRIS
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