Jan
2008
IBM recently introduced “OmniFind Personal Email Search (IOPES)”, a semantic search engine exclusively for companies that are interested to extend their employees more advanced tools for searching their e-mails stored in ‘IBM’s Lotus Notes’.
This new innovative concept of email search takes search beyond keywords by being able to make associations between the underlying concepts of words often used in ‘corporate e-mails’. IBM also intends to offer customers technology that can help them retrieve useful information hidden in e-mail databases.
“IBM’s OmniFind Personal Email Search (IOPES)” is a result of the collaborative research conducted by the ‘IBM Research Labs’ in Almaden, California, in Haifa, Israel, and in Delhi, India.
The facility works with simplicity in search. For instance, if a person is looking for a colleague’s phone number, then he would type “Paul phone” in the query box. The search in turn would give results for Paul’s phone number. It becomes possible because the system is smart enough to make the association that the person is looking for Paul’s number, and not just any phone number in an e-mail with the word “Paul” in it.
IBM designers created an index of keywords found in corporate e-mail, and then linked it with another index of associated concepts and relationships. Shiv Vaithyanathan, manager of unstructured information mining at” IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, USA” ,says, “ when a query is submitted, the system first matches the words with those in the keyword index, and then delivers results based on the associations”. Specialists at IBM have also added rules to help the system determine what information is most likely being sought.
IBM made this software available for “Lotus Notes”. This smart ‘email search tool’ eliminates the frustration many of us feel when irrelevant search results are returned for a simple text or keyword search. It has inbuilt common search concepts, such as dates, times and phone numbers. It also has some additional search parameters, such as meeting requests or specific locations. These parameters may be defined and used on the fly without any programming expertise. Such user-defined concepts can be shared between individuals and used to build a more personalized search system.
“With gigabytes of e-mail storage readily available to nearly everyone, e-mail has evolved from a simple communication tool into a personal database where we retain vast amounts of valuable information,” said Douglas Wilson, Chief Technology Officer of Lotus. He adds further, “We continue to deliver better tools to speed and improve personal mailbox search, and ‘OmniFind Personal Email Search’ illustrates how IBM’s advanced technology delivers the ability to quickly and easily access the precise information we need, exactly when we need it”.
This software is based on the “Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA)”, an open source software framework that helps organizations build new analysis technologies to realize more value from their unstructured information by discovering relationships, identifying patterns, and predicting outcomes. Originally developed by IBM, UIMA is now an open source project at the “Apache Software Foundation (ASF)”. UIMA is used extensively in enabling text analysis, extraction and concept search capabilities in other parts of the ‘IBM OmniFind enterprise search portfolio’, including ‘OmniFind Enterprise Edition’, ‘OmniFind Analytics Edition’, and ‘OmniFind Yahoo! Edition’.
This new and creative search based system has enabled the IBM specialists to have developed technology that runs on top of the framework for quickly extracting words and concepts from electronic documents, comparing them to the indexes and delivering results based on algorithms developed by the scientists.
IBM Researchers have empowered this software with advanced algorithms that can interpret incomplete queries and find information such as phone numbers, people, meetings, presentations, documents, images and more.Several major corporate companies including ‘Google’, ‘Microsoft’, and ‘Yahoo’, are also developing more advanced search algorithms in order to deliver better answers to queries.
Shiv Vaithyanathan accepts that semantic search becomes less effective as the universe of possible concepts and relationships associated with words grows, which is why it would be difficult to implement, for example, in a huge, general purpose Web mail system.
Targeting a corporate e-mail system gives researchers a narrower set of possibilities in determining the kind of associations the system should make of words. In addition, IBM has made it possible for developers to expand the “OmniFind Indexes”.
The “IBM OmniFind Personal Email Search (IOPES) “plug-in is available at “alphaWorks”. It is an online community that gives the outside world a unique peek into the work underway in IBM labs by highlighting the company’s most cutting-edge work and providing it at no cost. As on today, more than 90 of the ‘Fortune 100 Companies’ are making use of “alphaWorks” technologies. The company at the same time hopes that the feedback it gets from developers will help to improve the technology by finding its shortcomings. “Finding out the things we should do is precisely why we’re putting it out there,” said Shiv Vaithyanathan.
