One objective of vectorization is to render unstructured text more machine-usable. Vector embeddings accomplish this by encoding the semantics of text as high-dimensional numeric vectors, which can be employed by advanced search algorithms (normally an approximate nearest neighbor algorithm like Hierarchical Navigable Small World). This not only improves our ability to interact with unstructured text programmatically but makes it searchable by context and by meaning beyond what is captured literally by keyword.

Hey Community!

We're happy to share a new video from our InterSystems Developers YouTube:

     ⏯  Vector Search Performance @ Ready 2025

10:47 AM — Jose Garcia's creatinine test results arrive at the hospital FHIR server. 2.1 mg/dL — a 35% increase from last month.

What happens next?

• Most systems: ❌ The result sits in a queue until a clinician reviews it manually — hours or days later.
• This system: 👍 An AI agent evaluates the trend, consults clinical guidelines, and generates evidence-based recommendations — in seconds, automatically.

No chatbot. No manual prompts. No black-box reasoning.

This is event-driven clinical decision support with full explainability:

✅ Triggered automatically by FHIR events ✅ Multi-agent reasoning (context, guidelines, recommendations) ✅ Complete audit trail in SQL (every decision, every evidence source) ✅ FHIR-native outputs (DiagnosticReport published to server)

Built with:

• InterSystems IRIS for Health — Orchestration, FHIR, persistence, vector search
• CrewAI — Multi-agent framework for structured reasoning

You'll learn: 🖋️ How to orchestrate agentic AI workflows within production-grade interoperability systems — and why explainability matters more than accuracy alone.

Who hasn't been developing a beautiful example using a Docker IRIS image and had the image generation process fail in the Dockerfile because the license under which the image was created doesn't contain certain privileges?

In my case, what I was deploying in Docker is a small application that uses the Vector data type. With the Community version, this isn't a problem because it already includes Vector Search and vector storage. However, when I changed the IRIS image to a conventional IRIS (the latest-cd), I found that when I built the image, including the classes it had generated, it returned this error:

Vector search is a retrieval method that converts text, images, audio, and other data into numeric vectors using an AI model, and then searches for items that are semantically close. It enables “semantic similarity search” from free text, which is difficult with keyword search alone.

However, in real use, I encountered cases where results that are “close in meaning” but logically the opposite appeared near the top of the search results.

This is a serious issue in situations where affirmation vs. negation matters. If the system returns the wrong answer, the impact can be significant, so we cannot ignore this problem.

This article does not propose a new algorithm. I wrote it to share a practical way I found useful when semantic search fails due to negation.

TL;DR: This article demonstrates how to run GraphRAG-style hybrid retrieval—combining vector similarity, graph traversal, and full-text search—entirely within InterSystems IRIS using the iris-vector-graph package. We use a fraud detection scenario to show how graph patterns reveal what vector search alone would miss.

---

Why Fraud Detection Needs Graphs

Every year, businesses and consumers lose billions to fraud.

The Rut

Up until early this year, I haven't been not doing much coding at all -- I had gotten sick of it.

After many years as a hands-on software engineer and data scientist, I got burned out around 2015. I switched to business development roles focused on "external innovation," then joined InterSystems in 2019 as a product manager. I missed the creative aspects of coding, but not the tedium. The endless cycle of boilerplate, debugging, and context-switching had left me creatively depleted. Like Jim Carrey's character in Yes Man, I found myself saying "no" to new projects -- so much so that I

Hey Developers,

Enjoy the new video on InterSystems Developers YouTube

⏯  Inside Vector Search - Technical Innovations In InterSystems IRIS @ READY 2025

InterSystems IRIS embedded vector search capabilities lets us search unstructured and semi-structured data. Data is converted to vectors (also called ‘embeddings’) and then stored and indexed in InterSystems IRIS for semantic search, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), text analysis, recommendation engines, and other use cases.

This is a simple demo of IRIS being used as a vector database and similarity search on IRIS.

Prerequisites:

1. Python
2. InterSystems IRIS for Health - as it will be used as the vector database

Repository: https://github.com/piyushisc/vectorsearchusingiris

Steps to follow:

Hey Developers,

Enjoy the new video on InterSystems Developers YouTube

⏯ First Customers Using Vector Search - Real World Experiences and Lessons Learned @ READY 2025

Hey Developers,

Enjoy the new video on InterSystems Developers YouTube

⏯ Enhancing Customer Engagement with Vector Search - Building a Customer Facing Chatbot @ READY 2025

How to set up RAG for OpenAI agents using IRIS Vector DB in Python

In this article, I’ll walk you through an example of using InterSystems IRIS Vector DB to store embeddings and integrate them with an OpenAI agent.

To demonstrate this, we’ll create an OpenAI agent with knowledge of InterSystems technology. We’ll achieve this by storing embeddings of some InterSystems documentation in IRIS and then using IRIS vector search to retrieve relevant content—enabling a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) workflow.

Note: Section 1 details how process text into embeddings.

In this article I will be discussing the use of an alternative LLM for generative IA. OpenIA is commonly used, in this article I will show you how to use it and the advantages of using Ollama

In the generative AI usage model that we are used to, we have the following flow:

• we take texts from a data source (a file, for example) and embedding that text into vectors
• we store the vectors in an IRIS database.
• we call an LLM (Large Language Model) that accesses these vectors as context to generate responses in human language.

We have great examples of this in this community, such as IRIS Vector

Hello Community,

Great news for developers who have just started working with InterSystems IRIS! We have hands‑on interactive tutorials available via the Instruqt platform! These are perfect for getting up to speed quickly, playing in real environments, and building confidence with IRIS‑based development.

Here is the list of available tutorials:

• Full Stack Tutorial - Experience how IRIS supports full-stack system architecture. 
• InterSystems Interoperability - Explore IRIS interoperability tools for connecting and integrating systems. 
• IRIS for Health Interoperability - Learn to use IRIS for Health features in application integration with data from an EHR (Electronic Health Record). 
• REST + Angular Application - Practice building applications with IRIS REST services. 
• RAG using IRIS Vector Search - Discover IRIS Vector Search capabilities for AI-powered applications. 

In today’s healthcare data landscape, FHIR has become the standard for structured clinical data exchange. However, while FHIR excels at interoperability, its JSON format makes analytics challenging—including FHIR QuestionnaireResponse.

Three Steps to Build It

1. Design and Collect the Questionnaire

Start by designing a FHIR

Hey Community,

Enjoy the new video on InterSystems Developers YouTube:

⏯ Using SerenityGPT to Build Out an Application GenAI Middleware at InterSystems @ Ready 2025

Yes, yes! Welcome! You haven't made a mistake, you are in your beloved InterSystems Developer Community in Spanish.

You may be wondering what the title of this article is about, well it's very simple, today we are gathered here to honor the Inquisitor and praise the great work he performed. 

So, who or what is the Inquisitor?

Perfect, now that I have your attention, it's time to explain what the Inquisitor is. The Inquisitor is a solution developed with InterSystems technology to subject public contracts published daily on the platform  https://contrataciondelestado.es/ to scrutiny.

Although the

Hi, 

We very much appreciate the interest in the Developer Community for IRIS Vector Search and hope our technology has helped many of you build innovative applications or advanced your R&D efforts. With a dedicated index, integrated embeddings generation, and deep integration with our SQL engine now available in InterSystems IRIS, we're looking at the next frontier, and would love to hear your feedback on the technology to prioritize our investments.

If you used Vector Search already and could spare 10 minutes of your busy schedule, here's a brief survey on your use of the technology so far,

Introduction

In a previous article, I presented the IRIStool module, which seamlessly integrates the pandas Python library with the IRIS database. Now, I'm explaining how we can use IRIStool to leverage InterSystems IRIS as a foundation for intelligent, semantic search over healthcare data in FHIR format.

This article covers what I did to create the database for another of my projects, the FHIR Data Explorer. Both projects are candidates in the current InterSystems contest, so please vote for them if you find them useful.

You can find them at the Open Exchange:

• IRIStool and Data Manager
• FHIR Data Explorer

In this article we'll cover:

• Connecting to InterSystems IRIS database through Python
• Creating a FHIR-ready database schema
• Importing FHIR data with vector embeddings for semantic search

With the rapid adoption of telemedicine, remote consultations, and digital dictation, healthcare professionals are communicating more through voice than ever before. Patients engaging in virtual conversations generate vast amounts of unstructured audio data, so how can clinicians or administrators search and extract information from hours of voice recordings?

Enter IRIS Audio Query - a full-stack application that transforms audio into a searchable knowledge base. With it, you can:

• Upload and store clinical conversations, consultation recordings, or dictations
• Perform natural language

IRIS Audio Query is a full-stack application that transforms audio into a searchable knowledge base.

Project Structure

community/
├── app/                   # FastAPI backend application
├── baml_client/           # Generated BAML client code
├── baml_src/              # BAML configuration files
├── interop/               # IRIS interoperability components
├── iris/                  # IRIS class definitions
├── models/                # Data models and schemas
├── twelvelabs_client/     # TwelveLabs API client
├── ui/                    # React frontend application
├── main.py

Hi Community,

We’re excited to share a brand-new Instruqt tutorial: 

🧑‍🏫 RAG using InterSystems IRIS Vector Search

This hands-on lab walks you through building a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) AI chatbot powered by InterSystems IRIS Vector Search. You’ll see how vector search can be leveraged to deliver up-to-date and accurate responses, combining the strengths of IRIS with generative AI.

✨ Why try it?

Vanna.AI - Personalized AI InterSystems OMOP Agent

Along this OMOP Journey, from the OHDSI book to Achilles, you can begin to understand the power of the OMOP Common Data Model when you see the mix of well written R and SQL deriving results for large scale analytics that are shareable across organizations. I however do not have a third normal form brain and about a month ago on the Journey we employed Databricks Genie to generate sql for us utilizing InterSystems OMOP and Python interoperability.

Hey Community,

We're excited to invite you to the next InterSystems UKI Tech Talk webinar: 

👉AI Vector Search Technology in InterSystems IRIS

⏱ Date & Time: Thursday, September 25, 2025 10:30-11:30 UK

Speakers:
👨‍🏫 @Saurav Gupta, Data Platform Team Leader, InterSystems
👨‍🏫 @Ruby Howard, Sales Engineer, InterSystems

In the previous article, we saw how to build a customer service AI agent with smolagents and InterSystems IRIS, combining SQL, RAG with vector search, and interoperability.

In that case, we used cloud models (OpenAI) for the LLM and embeddings.

This time, we’ll take it one step further: running the same agent, but with local models thanks to Ollama.