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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Where these things (meta data or DB backed FS) would be most useful is in corporate environment where the number of documents is just massive. But as someone pointed out, the problem is to get good meta data. It doesn't help to know what application created what document. It doesn't tell whether a word or oo.org text document is a letter, an invoice, a specification, a marketing report and so on.
Any technical solution will have to do something : implement discipline amongst users. Make it impossible to save an undescribed document sounds harsh but I don't see how else the mess I see where I work would be cleared. It wouldn't take long before you end up with thousands of spreadsheet, presentation and text files with "miscellanious" as a description. Imagine that in a flat directory structure !
The best is probably to offer configurable schemes, offering coherent description framework appropriate for various contexts like Corporate, Individual, Consulting etc.... each containing a minimum set of mandatory categories.
I've not seen network transparency mentionned anywhere but that's an essential requirement.
That being said, I don't believe much in the whole concept. Solutions to this problem exist (documentation databases and so on) and the only context I have seen it used successfully is for critical documentation like contracts, invoices, commercail proposals, and generally speaking, externally binding documents. And it only works if dedicated staff is in charge of the process.
As an individual user, I've never had any problem keeping track of anything, although I can understand that people producing material (media or other) could have this problem.