Linked by Marcus Carlson on Wed 21st Jul 2004 18:17 UTC
In these days there has been much fuzzing about the new browsing with files organizing themselves with the help of meta data. Maybe you ask yourself "What have this to do with the spatial browsing in gnome and how can it improve the browsing?". That's what I did. As I see it, the gnome people have introduced the spatial browsing so we are used to it when this new browsing is coming to town. This is very intelligent move of the gnome people and will help us adopt faster to this. This is when the spatial browsing is really making sense. I hope you see this when you've read this article.
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It's a good start. However I believe we could collect more metadata without much active user interaction.
My 'vision' would be that applications and a meta-aware filesystem are able to store a common sense of metadata.
Imagine you create a new picture image called a.jpg. Now for some reason you need that same picture but only rotated 90 deg and you save it as b.jpg.
The application could now record the changes you made from file a to b, applications allready keep that records to provide some kind of 'undo'/'redo' feature, so why not save the changes made to that picture associated with that file?
Not only could a versioning system be provided (like cvs or subversion), because the filesystem would record changes between files and also related files (like in this example file a und file b are related/siblings), but you could also store the action you took (in this example: rotate 90 deg, no other changes).
If you would like to know, which files have the same content, you could find the files a.jpg und b.jpg. The same query would not be possible today without a huge overhead.
Similiar methods could be applied to other applications, like word processor etc.