What is RIS?

[sm_support2]

I saw messages referring to RIS. Can someone explain what that means?

[sm_support2]

RIS stands for Redution to Initial String, and it is one of the main strategies
adopted by the WURFL API to match UA strings which are not in WURFL, yet a UA string
that is similar enough can be found.

For example, iPads can issue two different UA strings in different situations:

Safari:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; nl-nl) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6522.18.5

Web App (=without version and safari)
Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; nl-nl) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/8J2

In version 1.3 of the API, the two UAs above would be matched one against the other by a RIS-based matching algorithm.