Semantic email

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 define 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 ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: WWW
• Authors: Luke McDowell, Oren Etzioni, Alon Y. Halevy, Henry M. Levy
• Keywords: Internet Technology, Keywords Semantic Web, Semantic Email, Semantic Email Processes, WWW 2004