There has been a growing movement in the computer industry as of late towards exploration of more database-like filesystem paradigms – the reason being that today’s filesystems are primitive, scattered, and cannot efficiently manage the immense amount of information that computer users have to work with on a regular basis every day. Many people are starting to arrive at the conclusion that today’s conventional computer filesystem has to be retired. Not perhaps from the system’s point of view, but from the user’s point of view. However, the best way in which to do this is still very much up in the air, and, in this editorial, Jared White of The Idea Basket comments on one implementation of this concept which he feels creates more problems than it solves.
Why Automatic Information Management is Doomed to Fail
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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how can he claim to write an article on Automatic Information Management, while it’s only criticism on Scopeware?
a bit ambitious i think
It’s a reasonable article, makeing common sense points. But isn’t Scopeware basically just an add-on, and not really a filesystem?
One could add programs to any OS that abstracts the data on the drive and lets the user organize it in any number of ways. I wonder why there aren’t already dozens of programs like Scopeware? There are certainly plenty of file managers and browsers.
…is because the head of the company that develops Scopeware is marketing it as a “replacement” for the filesystem/OS. Read one of Dr. David Gelernter’s articles on the subject. He’s trying to create a system that sits on top of the OS that provides a completely new interface for organizing information. Problem is, it’s a completely inadequate solution, in my opinion, and that’s what I talked about in my editorial.
Regards,
Jared
>I propose an information management system where files can
>be stored in categories, and metadata attributes would be
>attached to each file such as description, keywords,
>context, and other information that users can enter.
>Additional file-specific metadata, such as author and
>publication date for a manuscript, or director, cast, and
>crew for a movie, or artist and media type for a digitized
>painting, should be easy to specify and query later on.
>You should be able to view all files at once in a huge
>master view, or view one or more individual categories at
>a time. You should be able to sort by title, time, or any
>other metadata at whim in a standard icon or list view
>with the added element of a special metadata entry/preview
>pane. There should also be a timeline-based view: files
>would be organized on a horizontal axis by time (like a
>normal timeline) and on a vertical axis by another sort
>criteria such as title, time, etc. Advanced search queries
>could of course be saved and accessed later, and text
>indexing would be only one aspect of information
>organization, not the be all and end all of the entire
>system.
BeOS, been there done that, but I am sure it will be mainstream one day. Perhaps it might even be claimed as an inovation by a certain company.
Cheers
David
BeOS, and computers in general, are a huge wasted potential, thanks to money.
What I would really like is more of a de-emphasis on the concept of ‘files.’ What I mean is, something (an application) like Outlook (without the security holes of course) or some other PIM, but more on a grander scale where you can take a shit-ton of information and store it all in one file. And I don’t mean just notes, email and calendar, and other information normally associated with PIMs, I mean like sound files, rtf files, pics, text files, etc. Basically, a cross-platform, client-side database file format which can hold everything but the kitchen sink, is cross-platform and could easily be transported from computer-to-computer. Why would you want to do this? Because sometimes it’s easier to simply burn 1 file on a CD and carry it with you instead of having to burn 100.
Of course, you can do this with compressed files, but the interfaces you have to manage information inside of compressed files is kind of limited, compared to what you could do with it in a traditional PIM.
I posted this comment originally in the David Gelertner article. I edited it down and reposted it here.
Gelertner’s been preaching his “narrative streams” gospel for a while. Organizing data in chronological order in a database is good for SOME THINGS. This is why people have PDAs and appointment books and such, because brains are wonderful things, but not perfect.
But I don’t see how chronological order can help when people just have stuff.
Counterexample #1: I take a bunch of pictures for my mom’s birthday and put them on her computer. 6 months later she wants to look at them. Would it be easier to A. zoom through a Narrative stream and then pick apart everything that happened there, or B. Go to Pictures -> Mom -> Birthday_2002.
Counterexample 2#: I’ve got a humongous music collection. I want to burn a special mix CD for a party. Do I A. slog through my stream to figure out what I ripped when or B. Go through my folders organized by Genre, Artist, Album, etc.
In other words, different metaphors work better for different purposes, a good UI would simply seek to unify the basic methods used to access those metaphors, and allow differences among applications.
Oh, and if (when) voice recognition and AI become ubiquitous, it will be a LOT easier to link, organize, and comment on stuff via running commentary. Ex: “These are all pictures from my mom’s birthday party in 2001.” PEople are much more willing to talk than type.
The AI and db engine would associate “all” with the currently selected pictures, associate “my mom” with the current user’s mother’s name, and the status of being “mom”, and link them all with the words “birthday”, “party”, and the year “2001” (regardless of when you actually scanned the pictures, though that would be stored as well) as reference metadata.
Thus you could ask your computer for “All pictures from 2001” and your mom’s birthday pictures would come up.
THAT would make computers more useful. A natural language equivalent of the efficiency of shell scripting.
And, if necessary, things could be presented in a narrative stream if the user wants it. In fact, most applications would just take advantage of the built-in OS database engine for their needs, and all would have hooks for making them do stuff, so that “Open up all my pictures of Mom in ACDSee” would do something meaningful. Applications are still free to have whatever interface they want within certain limits, whatever is best for the task, they just have to follow the Rules.
Now, it wouldn’t be perfect, because there is room for confusion. Example: Do you mean pictures associated with “mom”, or pictures belonging to mom [Check permissions] or pictures with mom in them [pattern matching, check annotations] or all of the above? Still, it could work.
This kind of system would be a nice evolution of user interfaces before the Next Big Thing(TM), be it 3D worlds with holographic projection and spatial gestures, or whatever. This is just the kind of system I would use. And for power users, there would be a simplified programming language (AppleScript? Lisp?) allowing for efficient command prompt hacking without resorting to natural language processing. OF course, if one does not wish for voice recognition, an appropriate GUI would be crafted allowing “chains” of visual representations of commands.
You know what? Everything I said here has been done individually. From simple programming languages (Applescript), visual/voice shell scripting (IBM ViaVoice), natural language parsing (one of the darlings of AI research), database filesystems (BeOS BFS, IRIX XFS, IBM’s JFS, WinNT NTFS v5 and up, Longhorn’s WinFS, and my favorite Reiser4). It’s just that nobody’s unified them into a single, consistent, useful experience.
–JM
It is an application/OS issue.
The filesystem stores files. It does that. BeOS had a great filesystem and apps started taking advantage of it. Other filesystems have similar features, but people don’t write apps and OS’s to use the features.
Mutiny