Sending Emails Via Semantic Search

SEAmail is a new email system being developed by computer scientists out of Stanford that hopes to change (and simplify) the way we send messages online. SEAmail stands for “semantic e-mail addressing” – and will give email senders the power to send mail to people “without necessarily knowing recipients’ e-mail addresses, or even their names.” In other words, email senders can provide contextual information about their intended receivers – like “all professors that graduated from the Stanford Economics department since 1960″ or a nickname – and the SEAmail system will find and enter in the appropriate email address results, much like a search query.

According to the project’s developers, early versions of the system have been very positively received. MIT Technology Review reports:

Michael Genesereth, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford who works on SEAmail [explains]: “You want to send messages to people or roles, not to strings of characters,” he says. Semantic technologies are aimed at making just this sort of thing possible. The idea is to create programs that understand context, so that users can interact with the software more naturally. Technical details, such as the need to specify an e-mail address, get hidden inside the system, so that everyday users no longer have to pay attention to them.

… In SEAmail, a user selects recipients for a message in much the way that she would set up a search… The parameters can be as simple as a person’s name, or as complex as sets of logical requirements. But the system is limited by how much information it has about potential recipients. “To realize the full potential, we need to have rich data about the people who are sending messages to each other, their interests, and so forth,” Genesereth says. Within an organization, he says, there’s usually a lot of available data.

But getting good data for SEAmail becomes a much harder problem on the broader Internet than it is within an organization, Genesereth says. Although there are semantic standards that can allow systems to extract information about people from Web pages, he worries that outdated information could degrade the quality of the system.

Indeed – while we don’t know how useful or effective this sort of semantic system would be on a large-scale level, it seems like the logical next step for enabling quicker, simpler communication within companies, schools, and other controlled groups.

[MIT Tech Review via rbtrends]