Patent ID: 7437382

Claim:
A method in a computer system for determining importance of a message of a discussion thread, the method comprising: providing messages of a discussion thread, each message having an author; identifying replied-to relationships between messages indicating which messages are replies to which other messages; identifying authored-by relationships between messages and authors; and calculating and storing a value for an importance attribute of each message and a value for an expertise attribute of each author based on the replied-to and authored-by relationships, such that the importance attribute of a message is based on the expertise attribute of the author of the message and the importance attribute of messages that are replies to the message and such that the expertise attribute of the author of a message is based in part on the importance attribute of the message, wherein the value of the importance attribute indicates the importance of a message and including defining a function for the importance attribute and a function for the expertise attribute, wherein the function representing an attribute of an object is represented as F i =F i R i +Σ j≠i F j R ji where F i represents the attribute value associated with object i, R i represents intra-type relationships between objects of the type of the object i, and R ji represents inter-type relationships between objects of the type of the object i and other types j, the messages and authors being objects.