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By Chris Kanaracus
IDG News
Service
December
20, 2007
IBM has created a free semantic e-mail search engine aimed at users of
the company's Lotus Notes software and Microsoft Outlook.
The engine, called IOPES (IBM OmniFind Personal E-mail Search), allows
users to search their mail based on concepts, such as dates and phone
numbers, according to IBM. It also allows searchers to define their own
concepts.
Once the software is installed, it indexes and analyzes the user's
e-mail store. Searches are conducted through a browser interface that
delivers results through a stripped-down, Google-like interface.
Users can enter simple keyword-based queries or ones using basic natural
language constructions. For example, to find e-mails from a friend named
Mark Smith, you could simply enter "from Mark Smith."
But to find only the e-mails Smith sent in a certain month, a query
might be constructed as "Mark from January 2007." You could find his
phone number by typing "Smith's phone number."
The results don't show a list of e-mail headers or display the messages
in full. Instead, the software extracts the passage it believes contains
the right answer, and highlights what it deems to be the specific
information requested, such as a phone number.
Users can also search for attachments with search results providing
direct links to the documents in question.
E-mail is a good target for developing a semantic search engine because
users frequently repeat certain phrasings and words and repeatedly
exchange the same type of information. "There is a fairly large number
of things that are so e-mail specific," said Shivakumar Vaithyanathan,
the project's technical lead.
Researchers in a number of IBM labs worked on the project for the past
year and a half, according to Vaithyanathan. The product has been
quietly available on the company's alphaWorks site for a couple of
months, but only now is IBM attempting to drive widespread adoption,
according to a spokeswoman.
"To be able to solve all these problems in some meaningful way, we want
some feedback," Vaithyanathan said.
IBM also released the tool internally to its employees and said it has
received mostly positive responses.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/12/20/IBM-unveils-smart-e-mail-search-engine_1.html
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