Visualizing an enterprise social network from email

Understanding the patterns of sending and receiving email within an organization may help us to understand the historical and social dimensions of that organization. In addition to asynchronous person-to-person communication, email is also used for other purposes such as task management and personal archives. However, tools for visualizing, analyzing, and understanding communication patterns tend to focus on a static view of such patterns. We are developing a visualization system to help users perform tasks from perspectives based on temporal and connectivity patterns. Specifically, our system is designed to support browsing the email archive of W3C working groups. The archive has been made available to the TREC 2005 Enterprise Competition. This system supports both temporal views and linkage views. Temporal views can help users easily find a mail. Linkage views show emails that belong to the same discussion group. Linkage views make it easy to extract related information by showing the relationships of those messages and senders