HISTORY

The history of Sortnet began in 2002 with the commencement of a personal project by Yusuf Kacar (Bosphorus Univeristy) and Zekeriya Karayusuf (University of Virginia) to create software that is able to read and classify business e-mail containing certain criteria in export and import sector. While they were using the software with a simple interface for just personal use, the software attracted attention of some local shipbrokers who wanted to use this software in classification of their daily e-mail. By the support of these local brokerage firms in especially providing huge amount of e-mail messages for analysis, the Sortnet team began to develop the software for the shipping sector.

During the developing period the Sortnet team has analyzed close to one million messages and created thousands of unique algorithms in order to recognize cargo orders or ship positions contained in e-mail messages. Sortnet team also spent long hours on the storage of very huge databases and had to solve a number of problems related to compatibility of its interface so that it works efficiently on the web platform. After these improvements, Sortnet has evolved from personal software to a complex system providing auto-classification of e-mail for the shipping sector. It is the developers' ambition to serve with minimum, even zero failure. In order to achieve this, Sortnet still analyzes e-mail messages sent by supporting brokers and reported feedback of its clients and updates the software regularly. We would like to express our great thanks to the supporting brokers since the very beginning of this project for supplying us with a large amount of messages. Without their support, Sortnet could never exist.