STRUCTURED DESIGN OF A KNOWLEDGE-BASED MESSAGE DISSEMINATION SYSTEM

Abstract

Electronic Mail Systems (EMSs) have been a boon to organizational productivity, but these systems may not receive greater acceptance due in part to their general lack of robust system features. Particularly, the intractable problem of effective electronic mail dissemination management has largely eluded solution. This paper first provides a brief survey of several existing intelligent EMSs which seek to address the conundrum of mail management and then proposes an alternative solution which takes advantage of the unique characteristics of a knowledge base/database coupling to facilitate effective information sharing among members of an organization. This approach improves on prior Knowledge-Based Mail System (KMS) designs by (1) focusing on message dissemination management rather than on message receipt management, (2) separating the relatively static knowledge of message routing from the relatively dynamic knowledge of the organizational membership, and (3) incorporating a more comprehensive view of the semantic constraints involved in configuring distribution lists of message receivers through the use of the Structured Object Model (SOM) Methodology. The design concepts are illustrated by a prototype KMS, the Message Dissemination System (MDS).