Semantic email
WWW '04: Proceedings of the 13th international conference on World Wide Web, page 244--254. New York, NY, USA, ACM Press, (2004)DOI: 10.1145/988672.988706
Abstract
This paper investigates how the vision of the Semantic Web can
be carried over to the realm of email. We introduce a general
notion of semantic email, in which an email message consists of
an RDF query or update coupled with corresponding explanatory
text. Semantic email opens the door to a wide range of automated,
email-mediated applications with formally guaranteed properties.
In particular, this paper introduces a broad class of semantic email
processes. For example, consider the process of sending an email
to a program committee, asking who will attend the PC dinner,
automatically collecting the responses, and tallying them up. We
dene both logical and decision-theoretic models where an email
process is modeled as a set of updates to a data set on which we
specify goals via certain constraints or utilities. We then describe
a set of inference problems that arise while trying to satisfy these
goals and analyze their computational tractability. In particular, we
show that for the logical model it is possible to automatically infer
which email responses are acceptable w.r.t. a set of constraints in
polynomial time, and for the decision-theoretic model it is possible
to compute the optimal message-handling policy in polynomial
time. Finally, we discuss our publicly available implementation of
semantic email and outline research challenges in this realm.
