July 10, 2006
by Jonathan Haeber
Local Education Columnist
If you are an information systems management student at a local college, then let me introduce you to the newest jewel of your academic life. This database of e-mail messages will be a large part of your studies for years to come.
Many of us know about the Enron scandal following the energy crisis of 2000. As a result of its related indictments a vast tome of e-mail messages was publicly released in 2003. Since then, local colleges and public universities across the country took advantage of the data, known as the "Enron corpus."
Evidence turned to Gold
Today, the Enron corpus is being used in an array of academic and commercial pursuits, from social studies of online behavior, to the creation of information systems management software. In its entirety, the database is comprised of about 1.5 million messages from 176 employees at Enron. Though it has served extremely well as evidence in the trial of top executives, it is also the largest publicly available e-mail dataset. The corpus' widespread availability makes it the perfect test data for a number of Information Systems Management projects.
An anti-spam company known as Inboxer was the first known commercial user of the Enron Corpus. CEO Roger Matus needed a large set of messages to test his company's software. When the Enron corpus was made available, Matus' company quickly utilized it. He opened the first message dumped out from a scan and knew immediately that they had hit pay dirt; the e-mail read, "So you were looking for a one-night stand, after all?"
"That was the moment I knew we had a good testing corpus," Matus told Wired News
Information Systems Management and You
Enron was one of the greatest scandals of this decade, but out of Houston, Texas came a set of e-mail messages that will prove invaluable in future studies. If you feel that Information Systems Management is in your future, then you can explore the many local Houston colleges available on this site. Perhaps someday, you'll be running your own tests with the Enron Corpus.
Sources
About the Author
Jonathan Haeber is no secret agent man, but writes about merchandise as a full-time copywriter for Discovery Channel Stores. He graduated from U.C. Berkeley with degrees in English and Geography.
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