So I was watching one of Scott Wheeler’s presentations (link) on what will (hopefully) be KDE4′s new metadata system. The idea is to create a system where you give up the hierarchical (directory-based) paradigm in favour of a search-based one. Maybe the solution is too simplistic for now, and a hybrid model with a shallow hierarchy and mostly search-assisted access will be an intermediate, but I think it’s the way of the future. Anybody who’s used ‘* Desktop Search’ will know. The KDE, Gnome, and Reiser4 folks are pulling in different directions, but the final solution will have to be a mix of all of these – approximately respectively: desktop environment support for metadata collection, full-text indexing of files, and filesystem-level support for metadata storage.
One of the ideas is that when you open the File->Open dialog box in an application, you get a search tool rather than a file browser. The Gnome folks were also talking about this a while back on the Beagle mailing list. But what do we do about saving files? There’s too much data for sorting to be effective – think about how much e-mail you get, and how many files you have to work with, if you work with a computer for more than an hour each day. Chances are that it’s a whole bunch of data.
So have you ever used del.icio.us? Or any other system that basically lets you “tag” the item your storing/saving/publishing? This should be a viable solution for the files on your hard-disk too. The File->Save dialog would basically ask you for a file name, automatically extract metadata such as the file type, author, source, etc. and also give you an interface to tag the file. Once the system has been in use for a while, you’ll have a bunch of common tags. Just pick the tags you want to apply, and you’re done. Of course, this requires a huge amount of dependence on your desktop environment alone – bye bye command line. Something to be thought about – a number of solutions are possible. A real live example of this is the del.icio.us plugin for Firefox. It officially replaced my Firefox bookmarks manager a few months ago.
Exciting times ahead for the desktop world.
5 Comments
Yeah. Nice post.
You might be interested in this also, I guess.
http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displayStory.cfm?story_id=4368267
Thanks – interesting article. Scott Wheeler says the smae thing – it’s silly that it’s easier to find stuff on the Web than on your own computer.
Tiger (Mac OSX) does this already – it extracts metainfo and also provides a nifty non-intrusive interface for you to tag the folder/file/whatever for search.
And it works on the commandline too, since you can search for the metainfo using two commands (the beauty of the mac os x as it exists)
What we’re talking of here is of integrating that into the desktop environment itself – you open any “File Open” dialog, and you should get this standard search interface. I believe Apple will eventually do that once Spotlight becomes invaluable to users.
tiger already does this