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newdocms: Beyond the Hierarchical File System
Manuel Arriaga writes "After two years of hard work (and many scrapped versions), I have just released a (ugly, but working!) preview version of newdocms, a completely new document management system. newdocms isn't a file browser: it is a layer between the hierarchical file system (HFS) and the user, which provides a radically new way to store and retrieve documents. No longer will you browse complex directory trees or directly interact with the HFS; instead, you define any number of document attributes when saving a document and then query a database of those attributes when trying to retrieve it later on.
For the first time you have a true alternative to the hierarchical file system at the OS level. Through the modification of the KDE shared libraries, newdocms currently works with all KDE apps! (I am looking for volunteers to add support for GNOME and OpenOffice.org!) This is a testament to the power of free software: this sort of innovation could never happen if it weren't for the free software nature of the underlying systems."
"This is a testament to the power of free software: this sort of innovation could never happen if it weren't for the free software nature of the underlying systems."
... or not. As I recall, BeOS had a fully functional database driven file systerm although it did not entirely through out the hierarchical side of things either (probably a good decision in my opinion). In fact, I recall reading a while back that future versions of Windows were supposed to have database driven file systems as well.
While free software is great, let's not get too cocky about what kind of innovations it can produce when we aren't aware of what the traditional software companies have already done.
Microsoft Sharepoint also allow you to store your own metadata with files - and also grab the "properties" from office files. This is not to substitute the folder tree, but in addition to it, and it's indeed a great tool (aimed more at the corporation than the individual)
:-P
But it's MS and here I am burning karma for just mentioning it. Big deal, I can spare the karma
Windows XP has most of the groundwork for this - Windows has actually had it for a while; for some reason the last piece (the filesystem that lets you take advantage of it all) keeps not showing up.
You want metadata on files? NTFS streams give you a place to store metadata (much like Mac resource forks but with any number of named streams).
You want to search on the metadata? The Microsoft Indexing Server will build a database and let you search on it (though it's a very strange system to use - in XP go into Administrative Tools, Computer Management, Services and Applications, Indexing Service, System and click on "Query the Catalog". You can do instant searches for all kinds of stuff, look at the help.
OLE Structured Storage is like a single file version of the filesystem we're talking about - a way of saving a bunch of objects (some of which you didn't create but that are in your document) into a file. I believe Microsoft's Office apps use it (could be wrong there though).
Right-click on an MP3 file and pick Properties in XP and go to the Summary tab. There's the metadata - the stuff the index server is going to index. If you add a new file format to the system, you can supply a DLL that will be able to supply the metadata for those files - so you download an MP3, save it on your disk, and the index server uses the DLL to get the metadata and add it to the database. It works pretty well.
I don't really have a point to all this, just listing some stuff that Windows has that "should" make it easy for Microsoft to add the OO FS someday and have it instantly work with existing apps.
- Steve
That indexing on W2K is just about worthless. It's much slower then anything in Unix and frequently It gets convinced that your hard drive is empty, by that I mean all searches instantly return false. I ended up turning it off it truly is a worthless piece of junk.
War is necrophilia.
Folders as a way of describing file hierarchies were part of the "desktop metaphor" that was developed in the late-70s/early-80s at Xerox PARC as part of the Xerox Star system. (I might have some of these details wrong, I worked at Xerox in the 80s.) The whole point of the desktop metaphor was to transform geeky computer internals into concepts the average office worker or exec could understand. Star even used "file cabinets" to organize folders.
/a/maze/of/twisty/little/folder/names/all/differen t.
Anyway, we did a lot of other cool stuff at Xerox in the 80s. There were two other information management systems that used non-hierarchical organizations. The Analyst (implemented in Smalltalk-80) and NoteCards (in Lisp) both had lattice file systems. You could create arbitrary links from one item to another, with lots of different kinds of links each with its own semantic meaning. It was an amazingly powerful way to navigate your files.
Why go to all that trouble? Because we found that it didn't matter how carefully people filed stuff away, they always were losing things. So the important thing was to make it as easy as possible for people to find their files, either by browsing or searching. In The Analyst, a document could be linked to by multiple folders, keywords, or other documents. The browser and search tools took advantage of the richness of linkages to make finding things easy. You just had to remember a few things about the item to locate it, rather than having to recall
Corel products have been doing essentially that for years -- you can set any number of directories as "places to find whichever sort of file", named and sorted however you like. And they do remember where you were working last time you had that app up.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?