Facets ‘Lite": Discovery Navigation for Thunderbird
August 18, 2008
David Huynh, a research scientist at MIT, posted in March 2008, a brief description of Seek 1.0. This software plug in allows a user to locate information in Thunderbird email. In eCommerce and enterprise search, Endeca has been successful positioning itself as one of the leaders in point-and-click interfaces. The idea is that during content processing, the system identifies concepts, entities, and relationships. A user has the option of plugging a word into a search box or browsing categories or other objects displayed. The user can scan a list of hot links, click on one, and begin examining information. Key word search is useful, but if the user does not know the terms to use, the browse feature becomes a useful way to locate information.
The Seek 1.0 component, according to Dr. Huynh’s Web log here, “an extension for Mozilla Thunderbird that provides faceted browsing features to let you search through your email more efficiently.” Commercial systems can be expensive. Dr. Huynh’s is available here. Endeca is most likely aware of Dr. Huynh’s activities, and Dr. Huynh lists one of Endeca’s research scientists in his “blogroll”.
Here’s a snippet of the interface:
After installing the component, navigate to the Thunderbird Tools menu and click on Seek. You are good to go.
Mr. Huynh says:
It is thus important that everyone be able to deal with data themselves: gather data, sift through data, integrate data, interpret data, make informed conclusions, and present their findings to their peers and to the world.
For me the importance of Seek is that the system is sufficient light weight to run on most notebook computers. Furthermore, the interface integrates well with Thunderbird, so users don’t have to understand metadata to make use of the system. Finally, for now, the system is making discovery interfaces available to a broader range of email users.
Is there a downside? The system does take some time to process content. I didn’t notice significant latency, but I have a fire breather and you may have an asthmatic gizmo. We have not subjected the component to crash recovery testing; that is, is it possible to restore indexes in the event of a problem. We will get to that in the days ahead. Finally, there are a number of commercial systems gearing up to enhance, improve, and search email. At this point it’s not clear how these services will serve to confuse users which can create traction problems for interesting projects like Seek.
A happy quack to Dr Huynh and the rest of the technical Jedi knights at the MIT Haystack Group. If you want to know more about Dr. Huynh, here’s cv is here.
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2 Responses to “Facets ‘Lite": Discovery Navigation for Thunderbird”
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David is doing great work, and I’ve blogged about his latest project here: http://thenoisychannel.blogspot.com/2008/08/david-huynhs-freebase-parallax.html
He gave a talk at Endeca last year, and in general my colleagues and I try to spend as much time as we can with the Haystack group, which is just a couple of blocks from Endeca’s office. You can see some of the fruit of that collaboration in last year’s Human-Computer Information Retrieval workshop: http://projects.csail.mit.edu/hcir/
I know that information access can seem like a cut-throat field, but some of us do try to collaborate across institutional boundaries.
Dan Tunkelang,
Thanks for your comment. It’s good to see cross institution coordination and communication.
Stephen Arnold, August 19, 2008