Nova Spivack has announced the imminent release of a semantic Web tool for the desktop, Open Iris:
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 their information. It can run on it’s own, or can be connected to the CALO system which provides advanced machine learning capabilities to it. I am very proud to see IRIS go open source — I think it has potential to become a major platform for learning applications on the desktop.
IRIS is still in its early stages of evolution, and much work will be done this year to add further functionality, improve the GUI and make IRIS even more user-friendly. But already it is perhaps the most sophisticated and comprehensive semantic desktop PIM ever created. If you would like to read more about IRIS, this paper provides a good overview.
