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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Without conceptual processing, no system of metadata can be sufficient to handle human knowledge processing needs.
And very few people in AI research are working on conceptual processing these days. It's the core issue in AI and it's the hardest issue in AI, so everyone is dodging it and working on "easier" things like machine vision, machine learning (which is also hopeless without conceptual processing) and the like.
Metadata of any kind is just a poor substitute until a good conceptual processing simulation is available. The same applies to OOP in programming - it's just a poor substitute for REAL system engineering tools.
As for Longhorn, you look at the hardware requirements for this thing - it's just not going to fly with most people because it will require an expensive hardware upgrade. They're talking a GB of RAM and a 3GHz CPU just to run the OS - with no applications running.
Adoption of this OS will be even slower than Windows XP was. A significant percentage (a third or more) of corporations are still running 98 and 2000 and have never upgraded to XP. Are they going to spend another couple grand per PC to upgrade to Longhorn? I don't think so.
The only way metadata can be useful today is if the system is able to read and interpret data being entered while a file is being created and automatically include that data in the metadata store. If I write a document, the system should be able to read that document and be able to find it based on any data in that document.
If it is an image, it's hopeless - no computer can read an image, so I have to enter the data.
Also, the content of the metadata must be variable - I should be able to specify the meaning of every field, not just have a few standard fields to fill in.
Basically, the best way would be to have one huge comment field which the system reads and then can find the file based on any content in that comment field. At least for music and image files, this would work. I could pop up a dialog and enter several sentences about the image or music which would include names, dates, places, genres, anything at all that has meaning to me. The system would automatically index that image based on ALL the content in the field (leaving out "noise" words like "the").
But it would be better if the system could retrieve that info from wherever I GOT the file from. If I download an MP3 from a Web site, that Web site has already identified the MP3 - the artist, where it was made, when, etc. The system should be able to retrieve that information automatically as I download the MP3 - then all I need to do is add any additional metadata that is important to me that the original metadata omits.