Freely Available Information Filtering Systems

SIFT

The Stanford Information Filtering Tool, developed by Tak Yan at Stanford University, includes two selective dissemination services, one for computer science technical reports and one for USENET news articles. The source code is also available. Papers describing the development of SIFT can be found here. A specialized filtering service run by the European Bioinformatics Institute which uses the SIFT package can be found here.

GroupLens

An experimental collaborative filtering service based on "Better Bit Bureaus" which is itself a collaborative venture between Paul Resnik of the Center for Coordination Science at MIT and Brad Miller and others at the University of Minnesota. Jon Herlocker also has posted some information on his NR newsreader which will include some filtering functionality when it is released.

Firefly

A collaborative filtering service for music and movies. A paper describing some of the techniques used in Firefly by Alexander Chislenko is also available.

InfoScan

A program from Machina Sapiens, Inc. which filters email and USENET News and includes document visualization features. Demo versions are available free for the Macintosh and Windows 95.

InfoTicker

A web-watching robot with filtering functionality developed by Erik Mueller.

UseNet-News Filter

A USENET News filtering system by Elmar Haneke of the University of Bonn in Germany.

WIRA/SG

A slick USENET news filtering service for USENET newsgroups about Singapore developed by the Information Technology Institute of Singapore. A paper by Kok Lai on information filtering can be found here.

WISEWIRE

Empirical Media's filtering service that delivers webpages, newswire articles,and netnews.

BORGES

A USENET News filtering system using Wordnet developed by Digital Equipment B.V. in the Netherlands, Alan Smeaton's research group at Dublin City University in Ireland, and Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona in Spain. Information on the project support through I'M Europe can be found here.

RAMA

An Unix based USENET news filtering system by Jim Binkley of the Portland State University Computer Science Department.

Browse

An X windows neural network based USENET news filtering system by Andrew Jennings and Hideyuki Higuchi. Their paper from the March, 1992 IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems is also available.

NewsClip

A unix programming language designed for filtering USENET News that is capable of binary filtering when used with any newsreader. When used with STRN, the Scoring Threaded version of the unix ReadNews (RN) program, ranking articles in order of likely relevance is also possible.

Mfilt

A rule-based system for filtering electronic mail developed by Tina Holmboe of the University of Oslo.

Sift-Mail

An system for filtering electronic mail developed by Laurence Lundblade of Virginia Tech.

Lurker

A rule-based USENET News filter written in PERL by Vince Taluskie of UT Austin's Physics Department. Lurker can archive the selected articles on disk or send them by electronic mail.

SMART

A unix package designed for performance evaluation of vector space information retrieval techniques by Gerard Salton and Chris Buckley of Cornell University. The capability to filter USENET News is included in the standard distribution. An excellent tutorial on SMART has been put together by Hans Paijmans and a technical report on the implementation of an earlier version of SMART that is particularly helpful can be found here.

MAXIMS

MAXIMS is a collaborative electronic mail filtering system developed by Max Metral of the MIT Media Lab Autonomous Agents Group for the Apple Macintosh which is based on the freely redistributable version of the Eudora mail program.

NN Collaborative Filtering Patch

A patch to the nn version 6.4 newsreader to perform collaborative filtering developed by David Maltz. The MIT Masters thesis which describes his research can be found here.

Procmail

A unix package designed to automatically filter electronic mail. The Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) about filtering electronic mail on Unix systems can be found here. That FAQ also describes the filtering system that is provided with the ELM mailer.

Mailfilt

A perl script to filter electronic mail written by Michael Fisk of New Mexico Tech.

Mailagent

A rule-based electronic mail filtering system developed by Raphael Manfredi.

WebWatcher

WebWatcher is a World Wide Web filtering system developed by David Zabowski and others of the Pleiades Project at the Carnegie Mellon University Learning Lab which learns your preferences and highlights interesting links on web pages that you visit. It also includes some collaborative filtering functionality, suggesting known pages that others have visited which appear to be related to your interests.

NoShit

A colorfully named system which filters the content of World Wide Web pages in real time developed by Axel Boldt of the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Web Filter

A WAIS-based World Wide Web filtering system for items announced on the NCSA What's New Page developed by Steve Gant of the School of Library and Information Science at the University of North Carolina.