Supporting Collaboration by Large Scale Email Analysis

Email has become the most widespread Internet application. It is a tool supporting not only communication but also cooperation, task management, archiving, or information and knowledge management. Furthermore Email is a source of information on personal, job or community network of an individual or an organization. Email communication analysis allows extraction of social networks with further connection to people, organizations, locations, topics or time. This paper presents simple examples explaining how to extract a social network from email communication using approaches from the field of information retrieval and semantic annotation. We describe an experiment on the Hadoop distributed architecture designed to process large email archives.