CIFOO: MarkMail

Something that I really liked at CIFOO was the presentation by Jason Hunter of MarkLogic's MarkMail product (Jason blogs on the MarkMail weblog). MarkMail is a growing repository of 8MM posts to mailing lists, growing at approximately 2k per day. There are two attractions for me to this system. Firstly, it deals with a nice community source: mailing lists. Secondly, they have made some innovations in the interface which break from the standard search interface.

A search brings up a multi-functional panel which include a time series of posts that match the search term. In addition, information about the lists, authors and other details of the matched messages are provided. They also have a nice little touch which slides the interface left and right to provide access to the original full post.

Jason was really open about sharing some of the cool features of this system as well as some of the acknowledged challenges in the space (e.g. what is a sensible ranking function for this type of data set).