Semantic Technology Will Improve Email Usability
Scientists from Stanford University are perfecting an email system that finds out who messages are intended for and the whether or not senders know the addresses.
A technology that understands phrases and relationships between words instead of simply recognizing typed characters can scour data bases and the Internet to track down the intended recipient.
Michael Genesereth, Stanford computer science associate professor, and other researchers in Ireland, Austria and at the university started to test a semantic emailing addressing system several years ago.
The test was so successful that the experiment will be expanded to the people in the Stanford Computer Science Department this year.
If this next trial succeeds, the semantic email technology will be put to the use throughout the Silicon Valley university’s campus.
Some big corporations have reportedly expressed interest in the system.
"The idea is to change the way we address email," Genesereth said.
"You really want to send messages to people, not a string of characters. This way, you describe the person you want to receive the email instead of characters."
An example of this would be if someone wants to send a message to the head of a department or peers in a work group, they enter that into their email system, which then figures out where to send messages.
"In a sense, your address book does become obsolete," Genesereth said.
"There is a lot of data about people and organizations. It is semantic data available on the Web and our email programs should be able to use that for smart addresses for our messages."
This technology is expected to begin in companies and other organizations interested in letting workers be more efficient in the internal personal data bases.
According to Genesereth, as companies share data with partners, and information on the Internet grows more reliable, semantic email addressing should "grow virally."
Concerns about this are that junk email senders will seize upon the technology to deluge people with "semantic spam."Â The researchers disagree.
"It is funny but true, you could target specifically the people you want to reach," Genesereth said.
"There would be less need for spam blasts in a world of semantic email. Instead of sending email to everyone you send it to people who actually might be interested in what you are talking about."
Semantic email technology might be able to go against spammers by filtering messages based on who’s sending them.
Email systems filter unwanted messages based on perpetually updated lists of sender address considered spam sources. Spammers dodge these filters by routinely changing their sending email addresses.
"Issues that exist with semantic email are no different than exist with current email," Genesereth said. "If my email knows who is sending the message, I could use a smart spam filter."
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