Electronic communication via mediums such as e-mail, electronic messaging, group multimedia messaging, forum posting, etc., has become ubiquitous in the work place and personal lives of many people. Using e-mail as an example, it is not uncommon for a person to receive more than one hundred e-mail messages each day. Tools that help a person organize and locate received messages have been developed to ease the burden created by the sheer volume of electronic communications. Such tools allow a user to create folders to organize related e-mails, sort the e-mails by subject or by sender, and create queries to find messages that match the query.
However, these conventional tools are cumbersome and time consuming to use, and cannot comprehensively group related e-mails together so that a user can easily understand the various ideas contained in the group of e-mails. For example, tools that allow a user to move received e-mails to folders are cumbersome to use and prone to errors because the e-mails can be moved to the wrong folder. Similarly, tools that allow a user to search received e-mails based on queries using subject line, date, and sender can be difficult to write and may not successfully identify related messages when, for example, the subject line changes or when unrelated messages have the same subject line. Furthermore, conventional tools do not offer a way of determining the main ideas presented in an e-mail stream, how they are related to one another, and who authored them.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds