A free download from IBM's alphaWorks development site, IBM OmniFind Personal E-mail Search (IOPES) is a tool for use by individuals using Lotus Notes or Microsoft Outlook.

In brief, the utility provides for the user semantics-based search capabilities for their E-mail stores, allowing them to search for information based on recognized concepts as opposed to requiring specific key words. As an example, the vendor notes that you could locate a person's phone number in a particular E-mail message even if the words "telephone" and "number" were not actually within the target E-mail that contained that person's phone number. The product ships with the pre-defined ability to recognize multiple concepts out of the box (including persons, phone numbers, addresses, or schedules), and includes a "tagger" utility that enables the user to create their own custom concepts that can then be shared amongst their colleagues.

Following installation, IOPES is automatically set to run at machine reboot; allowing it to index the E-mail stores in the background. Users must have administrative privileges to install the tool. The background indexing can be set to several levels, which correspond to the amount of CPU and system horsepower the tool will draw on (gentle, medium, aggressive, and full) and therefore the amount of time it will take to fully index the E-mail stores. The indexing process can also be turned off by the user, if so desired.

To launch a search, the user opens their Web browser (IE or Firefox; a plug-in is provided for Firefox 2.0+) and loads the tool's search page, a shortcut to which is placed on the user's desktop during installation. From this search page the user can launch their concept based searches; with the tool's indexing engine automatically recognizing and analyzing its defined concepts as well as relationships between them in the E-mail data and presenting results based on the analysis. If necessary, the search engine can additionally interact with the user to request further information should their search query be not understood. The tool is able to search only local (not remote) E-mail stores; it cannot index/search other files or documents.

IOPES leverages the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA), itself a framework for the conceptual analysis of content such as text, audio, and video. UIMA is currently an open source project at the Apache Software Foundation, with specifications being developed within a technical committee at OASIS (see related link below).

IBM OmniFind Personal E-mail Search is a free download and is available now. Visit the alphaWorks entry for further information.

product submission by DPW Staff

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