How many useful messages do we receive via email? The analysts say about 30 per day, with a cost of 1 or 2 hours of work to manage them.
In addition to the work necessary to clear off the incoming mail, we need to consider the work necessary to retrieve the data later in time. In fact, we tend to keep everything (even only to keep a history) and in doing so it’s…. 30 messages today, 30 tomorrow…
Controlling the situation is not easy. The data keep on growing, until reading everything becomes impossible, even with a good organization system, with different folders and sub-folders, because of transversal contents, and contacts and useful details scattered everywhere – where did I save that email from so and so with whom I’m working on that project for so and so? Maybe in the folder with his name, in that of the project, or of the customer…
The “search” function based on keywords (usually the only one available) can help us only if we know which is the right folder and if we can remember at least the author of the message and a specific word (and not too common) in the text. But in most cases we just remember a general idea, and as a consequence we can only proceed by trial and error, often without results, or having to search on the Internet for what we already have!
Despite the complexity of the problem (information is often subjective, instead of standard and objective), semantics can greatly improve these kinds of searches. One example is the possibility to automatically double-check more data, also extending the search to all the concepts and related sub-concepts.
For example:
”I’m looking for the sales of the competitor X”
with semantics I can retrieve not only messages containing “competitor X + sales”, but also those with “competitor X + billing”, “competitor X + turnover”
and also with:
”Product1 + Competitor + sales”, “Product2 + Competitor + revenues”, etc.
Everything as easy for the user as a keyword search.
