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IBM OmniFind Personal E-mail Search

A powerful semantic search engine that enables you to search your e-mail easily and effectively; plug-ins are available for Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes mail systems.


Date Posted: October 11, 2007
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Update: April 10, 2008

New versions for Outlook and Notes with improved support for non-English Windows machines; Outlook version now also supports IMAP and non-cached Exchange accounts.

What is IBM OmniFind Personal E-mail Search?

Simple keyword or text search is not always effective for quickly finding what you need. IBM® has gone beyond keywords by inventing a fast and accurate semantic search system for personal e-mail.

IBM OmniFind Personal E-mail Search enables semantic searching by extracting and organizing concepts and relationships from personal e-mail. Any business e-mail user who must search in order to accomplish a business purpose will find this tool invaluable. Customization of semantic concepts and the ability to share these concepts with colleagues make this tool especially useful for large enterprise customers.

IBM OmniFind Personal E-mail Search is easy to install and configure and automatically adjusts to desktop load.

How does it work?

Users simply type keywords to express their queries. The tool intelligently matches these queries against pre-defined concepts (such as persons, phone numbers, addresses, or schedules) and relationships amongst such concepts (such as a person's phone number or address). In ambiguous situations, the intelligent search engine will interact with the user in order to determine the user's true intention.

Users can create new concepts using the tagger utility and thereby customize their semantic search. Both system tags and user-defined tags are searched during run time.

The tagger utility also enables users to easily share taggers, thereby promoting community search efficiency and cooperation while keeping their e-mail private.

The components of IBM OmniFind Personal E-mail Search are as follows:

  • an e-mail crawler (Lotus Notes/Outlook)
  • a document-processing, concept-tagging pipeline
  • an indexing component
  • a run-time semantic search component
  • a tagger utility.

The new versions for Outlook and Notes have improved support for non-English Windows machines. The Outlook version now also supports IMAP and non-cached Exchange accounts. Please see these instructions for configuring Outlook appropriately.


About the technology author(s):
Sriram Raghavan, of IBM's Almaden Research Center, develops powerful semantic search technology that exploits structured information extracted from text to enable high-precision keyword information retrieval.

Rajasekar Krishnamurthy, Ph.D. (Almaden), focuses on scalability and quality in the context of large-scale information extraction systems and is building a declarative rule-based information extraction system.

Eser Kandogan, Ph.D. (Almaden), is interested in information interaction, user interfaces, semantic search, human interaction with complex systems, ethnographic studies, information visualization, and end user programming.

Yosi Mass (Haifa, Israel) leads several projects, is responsible for numerous patents and publications, and is the father of the "XML Fragments" query language for semantic search in XML and in Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA).

Nadav Har'El (Haifa) works on information retrieval in geographic data mining, desktop search, advanced faceted search, and social search. He created the popular Hspell, an open-source Hebrew spell-checker used by OpenOffice and Google's Gmail.

Michael Bluger (Haifa) works on textual search, including desktop search. His background is in natural language processing, artificial intelligence, machine translation, agent-based Web search, text analysis and classification, and information retrieval.

Huaiyu Zhu, Ph.D. (Almaden), focuses on infrastructure for text analytics and applications, and, in particular large-scale analytics for enterprise search applications.

Ganesh Ramakrishnan, Ph.D. (India), focuses on information extraction, especially rule and feature induction using inductive logic programming, speeding up of rule-based information extraction techniques, and environments for developing and organizing rules.

Kyna Sah manages projects of IBM's Information Management (IM) Architecture Board, Advanced Technologies, for the IBM IM Chief Technology Office; her projects include launching new product initiatives at the Information On Demand Conference.

Shivakumar Vaithyanathan, Ph.D. (Almaden), manages the Unstructured Information Analysis group at Almaden and is the technical project leader for IBM OmniFind Personal E-mail Search. He is an associate editor for the Journal of Statistical Analysis and Data Mining.


Microsoft, Windows, Windows NT, and the Windows logo are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both.
IBM and Lotus Notes are trademarks of IBM Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both.
Other company, product, or service names may be trademarks or service marks of others.

View screenshots:
Screenshot illustrating ability of tool to search concepts and relationships.

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Related technologies

For platform(s):
Windows

For topics:
Collaborations, data mining, Search, semantics


 

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