iKnow goes Open Source!

Last week at the InterSystems BeNeLux Symposium, we announced the publication of the InterSystems iKnow Natural Language Processing technology to Open Source. This enables developers and researchers to take advantage of this unique technology at any level of their application stack, workflow or experiment.

The iKnow technology was developed by a Belgian company founded in 2001 and acquired by InterSystems in 2010. With InterSystems IRIS, we already introduced support for the industry-standard UIMA technology and this open sourcing is yet another step in making the technology more easily accessible to a broad audience. It's also an exciting start of a more dynamic engagement with the open source community, as we're welcoming contributions (not in the least for the 11 different languages we support today) and will continue to support and package the technology as an embedded library in the InterSystems IRIS Data Platform. We actually had our first externally-submitted pull request from a beta user even prior to the official publication  (thanks @Jonathan Levinson !)

You can read the press release and check out the GitHub repository right away. We're very much looking forward to your feedback as we're still exploring all the ins and outs of this wonderfully open world!