Briefs

By Kimberly Patch, Technology Research News, Mar 9, 2005

There's a lot of structure to a person's email. Rather than random isolated documents, individual email messages are often portions of a larger activity. Despite the inherent structure, and despite organizational tools such as folders, much of the world's email remains relatively unorganized.

Researchers from the University College Dublin in Ireland and IBM Research have developed a way to use the inherent structure of related email messages to automatically organize the messages by task.

First, the system groups messages according to the activity or task they relate to. For a user who participates in multiple eBay auctions simultaneously, the system would partition eBay messages into messages pertaining to the different auctions -- for example, a desk auction, a bed auction, and a dollhouse auction, said Kushmerick.

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