Integrated access to the Web mailing list archives

D.Barashev, S.Coox, E.Michailova, I.Nekrestyanov, B.Novikov, E.Pavlova, A.Vysotsky.
University of Saint-Petersburg
E-mail: mas-project@meta.math.spbu.ru

Abstract

Our work addresses the problem of providing a unified integrated access to the Web based mailing list archives which are considered as an example of semi-structured data. Due to specific structure of e-mail messages, general-purpose search engines are not effective for certain important classes of queries to such archives, for example for searching text in e-mail subject only. The proposed approach is based on combination of semistructured data processing and information retrieval techniques.

The major focus of the work is on automatic archive identification and wrappers generation. Several heuristics are explored and evaluated, such as searching links to archive pages, links verification, individual mails extraction and archives categorization. Possible ways of the practical usage of such system are described.