With new search software for Lotus Notes announced Thursday by IBM, users will be able to find information  in what the company described as "the vast personal database that e-mail has become."
The IBM OmniFind Personal Email Search (IOPES), from IBM's Research Labs, uses advanced algorithms that can figure out what is meant by incomplete queries and can find phone numbers, people, meetings, presentations, documents, images, and other data .
A search tool such as this is useful because e-mail is no longer a simple communication tool, Lotus Chief Technology Officer Douglas Wilson said in a statement, but has become a "personal database where we retain vast amounts of valuable information."
Inside Semantic Search
IOPES uses semantic searching so that users can, for example, find a phone number even if the words "phone" and "number" are not in the e-mail.
The concept of dates, times, phone numbers, and other terms are part of the tool's logic. And other concepts, such as meeting requests or locations, can be defined by users who are not programmers. In addition, users can share their customized concepts, and personalized searches can be saved.
The tool works by creating an index of keywords as well as another index of concepts and relationships. When a search is conducted, the tool finds the keywords in the first index and then relates them according to associations in the second one, assisted by rules provided by the searchers.
The IBM tool uses the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA), which is an open-source framework for creating analysis technologies to discover relationships, identify patterns, and predict outcomes in unstructured information.
UIMA was originally developed by IBM, and is also being used for concept search capabilities and text analysis in IBM's OmniFind product line, which includes OmniFind Enterprise Edition, Omnifind Analytics Edition, and OmniFind Yahoo Edition.
Available as Free Download
Matt Brown, an analyst with industry research firm Forrester, called the new tool "interesting" and said that there aren't "a lot of companies offering semantic search" on the desktop.
Being able to use your e-mail as a virtual database raises the question of whether it might become useful to keep all e-mails, forever.
Brown said that, if desktop semantic searching becomes popular, that decision would depend on the industry. Information workers "would love to have" the ability to search all their communications, he said, but "if you're a stockbroker or a politician," it could cause problems later.
It is available as a free download from alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/emailsearch.
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