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.
That's true, but what the other one said is, that you could generate this sort of metadata without the need to bother the user with it. And already with the amount of data someone good gather from the system itself would be very benificial for local search queries.
We all know that userers are lazy (well, at least myself is :-) ) and that the don't want to bother with creating metadata. Surely they don't want to be forced to do so. A good example that I always bring up was a older version of MS Word. MS forced the user at every saved file to enter more data about the document, very basic stuff like "author" "topic" etc. The had huge negative responses from there user so they removed that in the next fixup or whatever it was and changed it back to optionally.
To get metadata from casual users you have to collect it in a very low profile way. Because in my experience, and I'm working in that area, ordinary users don't see the benefits of this overhead. It's very very hard to get through to them. A totally different thing are "educated" users, e.g. librariens. They know how crucial good metadata is and therefore are willing to invest more effort in a document in order to benefit from it later on.
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.
A really nice approach of that kind is X2U (spotted it a while ago at freshmeat).