Contextify is a tool for maximizing user productivity by showing email-related contextual information. The contextual information is determined based on the currently selected email and includes related emails, people, attachments and web links. This content is displayed in a sidebar in Microsoft Outlook and in a special dialog that can display an extended context.
One way how Contextify displays the relevant contextual information is in a sidebar of Microsoft Outlook. The goal of the sidebar is to show important information related to the sender of an email being currently selected and shown within Outlook. This information is mainly gathered from past emails from this person but also from various online services such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
An example of the sidebar is shown in Figure 1. The top of the sidebar displays the person's photo together with the relevant personal information collected from Outlook contacts and online social services (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn). Other contextual information is organized into several tabs. In the rst tab we show the list of recent emails from this person together with several email details (Figure 1.a). For emails that are a part of a thread, the whole thread can be brought into view by clicking on the email. Below the list of emails there is also a tag cloud of keywords that best describe the content of these emails. The second tab displays the list of exchanged attachments together with various details (Figure 1.b). Attachments that were exchanged several times, probably because being updated, are grouped together. They can be opened by clicking on the lename. The third tab lists the people who are participating in these emails (Figure 1.c) while the fourth tab displays the web links that were exchanged in the emails. The sidebar also provides searching capabilities where the context is determined based on the search terms and not the sender of the selected email. The found search terms are also highlighted for easier recognition. In the future we'll add a tab with a summary with persons appearance on various social services. 3
An expanded context for the selected email can be displayed in the Contextify dialog. The goal of the dialog is to provide a visual display of the contextual information together with additional highlighting and ltering options. The context in this dialog consists of those emails where the participants (the sender and all the recipients) su ciently match the participants in the currently selected email. The context is de ned here as all emails sent to a similar social group.
Displaying email-related contextual information using Contextify Such a de nition of a context helps the user to see emails that are related to a particular aspect of his/her life.
An example of this dialog is shown in Figure 2. All emails that belong to the context are grouped into threads and displayed in the top left part of the dialog. Below the topic of each thread is a list of keywords that best describe the content of the thread. The bottom left part of the dialog shows a visualization of email activity for the computed context over time { each bar shows the number of emails that were received in a particular time period. By selecting or unselecting speci c bars the users can display only emails from a speci c time period. The right side of the dialog shows the social network for the participants in the context. There is a directed edge between persons A and B if there is at least one email sent from A to B. The font size for nodes depends on how often the person is present in the emails this helps quickly identifying the most relevant participants. Selecting a person in the graph also highlights emails sent by this person in the list of emails. 4
Accessing and modifying information about contacts can be done in the Contact management dialog. Here, we can manually group di erent email addresses that represent the same person. In this way, when showing contextual information, emails from all person's email addresses will be displayed. By clicking the "Import contact information" button additional information about contacts can be automatically imported from Facebook, LinkedIn and Outlook contacts. The "Cleanup contacts" button provides a fast way to tidy-up contact names and to merge contacts which are likely to represent the same person. An example of the Contact management dialog is shown in Figure 3. 5
The goal of Contextify is to determine and show the relevant contextual information that should help the user to more e ciently perform his email-related tasks. We are currently working on text-mining algorithms to provide additional functionality such as email summarization, automatic categorization of emails into folders, improved extraction of information from email contents and more advanced contact management.
A video demonstration of the add-on can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYpxhUvYM10 (lower resolution) and at http://www.screencast.com/t/ODg5MzM1YWEt (higher resolution). 6
This work was supported by the Slovenian Research Agency, the European Social Fund, the IST Programme of the EC under PASCAL2 (IST-NoE-216886) and ACTIVE (IST-2008-215040).