Filesystems, Metadata and Future OS Integration?

wdebruij asks: "After reading the 'The Mac, Metadata, and the World' article posted a few days earlier I was wondering what metadata progress is made outside of the Mac platform. I'm currently programming a set-based metadata system working on top of the standard file-system (called AtomsNet) and would like to know how the Slashdot community sees the future of metadata support in operating systems. The Resource Description Format and MPEG7 look like promising initiatives, but I do not know of any real life implementations so far."

Comments

BeFS and ReiserFS

[jfunk]

BeFS, used in BeOS has a metadata system that's pretty cool. You can do searches of that metadata, too. I've seen it mostly to store MP3 info so that you can do searches for particular songs/bands/albums without the search program having to open up all of your MP3 files.

The next major version of ReiserFS is intended to have a plugin system, allowing things like metadata and encryption, I highly recommend you check it out before continuing your own project.

Re:BeFS and ReiserFS

[STSeer]

about storing music info outside of the files and in meta-data, does this make sense for mp3 files? The convention is to store it in ID3 tags and if you store it as meta in the file system as well then you get duplication...

Re:BeFS and ReiserFS

[jfunk]

Yes it makes sense because a search program will not have to open up each individual file to get it's ID3 tag. To simply query the filesystem is multiple orders of magnitude faster.

Re:BeFS and ReiserFS

[STSeer]

a disk access is a disk access...

but anyway, yeah it looks it might be faster but that's not my point, my problem is that it's illogical in this case, since the data is already stored somewhere else and having two copies adds the unnecessary worries of keeping them synched

Some interesting reading...

[jmenezes]

For those who might have read the linked /. story but not the article which brought it about, here is the original ArsTechnica article.
Interesting, somewhat in-depth information on metadata and its uses both within and outside of the Mac.
Here and here is also some information on the NTFS filesystem, and how metadata is used there.
-Joel

Linux with Meta Data

[Tachys]

There a couple of projects which add meta data to Linux.

The first can be found here. This project adds ACLs and extended attributes to the ext2 filesystem.

There is also the XFS filesystem. This features extended attributes, ACLs and journaling.

I have also heard that extended attributes and ACLs are planned to be supported in the 2.6 kernel. I hope this is true because I think extended attributes can be used to make the Linux Desktop Enviroments alot better.

NTFS Has excellent support for MetaData

[PhunkySchtuff]

Win2k and XP both have very good system-level support for MetaData.
I was copying a file from an NTFS drive to a FAT drive the other day and the OS popped up a box telling me that the file i was copying had attached macintosh metadata information, and if i continued the copy to a FAT drive it would lose it.
With NTFS, you aren't limited to just the two forks, the Resource and Data, but can have pretty much as many forks (or Streams as they're called) associated with the file.
The only thing lacking with the streams support, is that simple commands, such as DIR only show the soze of the main $DATA stream.
This then lends itself to being a very good hiding place for stuff you really don't want found on some systems =).
-- kai