Luke McDowell
Alon Halevy
ABSTRACT
This paper investigates how the vision of the Semantic Web can be carried overto the realm of email. We introduce a general notion of semantice mail, 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 bothlogical and decision-theoretic models where an email process ismodeled as a set of updates to a data set on which we specify goals via certain constraints or utilities. We then describe a set ofinference problems that arise while trying to satisfy these goals and analyze their computational tractability. In particular weshow that for the logical model it is possible to automatically infer which email responses are acceptable w.r.t. a set ofconstraints in polynomial time and for the decision-theoreticmodel 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 inthis realm.
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Index Terms
- Semantic email
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