Slashdot Mirror
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."
I'm already using The Brain. It's *really* unique, and it works. It works very well. And, in addition to organizing files the way YOU want them organized, it also connects random thoughts, web sites, emails, etc. If you haven't seen it, check it out. It's pretty damn incredible.
What Microsoft suggested something like this, everyone went mental, and I got bitch slapped for saying I thought it was a good idea.
- Not confusing enough.
- No possibility of new patents.
- Lack of ability to lock users into your proprietary file system.
I didn't know HFS was broken.NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
1. "Filesystem? I don't need no stinkin filesystem!" An ideal Palm-esque computing environment wouldn't have any filesystem. There simply isn't any reason for it. Why would you store addresses in an address file or a book report in a word file? Saving/Opening files should be transparent to the end user. Versioning should be built in, yet simple to understand. Forking files can be accomplished without copying a file. This is intuitively the simplist idea.
2. If you somehow *have* to think in terms of files, then your conclusion may be to use files. However, I don't see why anybody would come up with a hierachical file system, unless they were accomidating for hardware limitations. Placing files somewhere within a huge directory tree is just too darn complicated. Why should the same file not exist in multiple directories? Why should copies of a file exist? Everything, including advanced security policies (more advanced than what is currently possible) is available for a *keyword* driven filesystem.
I believe this is a step in the right direction and I can't wait until my favorite OS (not Linux) adopts a similar feature.
That's the whole reason for the program -- you shouldn't have to remember long, detailed folder structures and filenames in order to retrieve a file you were looking for.
I can't tell you how many times I've had to help users find some file, shortcut, document or spreadsheet that they've "lost" because they forgot the correct path. But they do remember it involved a loan, or it involved a party announcement, or something similar. I swear, just the other day I spent an hour waiting on another employee to get off the phone so I could find a folder shortcut another employee had lost. She wasn't sure what folder the shortcut referred to, but she knew it contained documents of a certain type.
Do you see a pattern here? To me, this sounds just like what Microsoft is trying to do with Longhorn, and potentially Office 11. People are tired of searching and hunting through folders and heirarchies full of oddly named files and temp folders that can confuse Joe User.
This is awesome software and definitely a step forward. It might not change the geek community, but it will certainly help out system admins of the world. While your method still works (and hopefully, in the future, these two systems should work hand-in-hand, but that's another project I suppose), this is a damn fine alternative.
I agree. Basically the only way this is different from your HFS is that it encapsulates the meta-data (that is currently in the path name) differently. I'm not sure that's any better or worse. In fact, I myself like to be able to see at a glance what all the categories of documents that I have are which is quite easy with HFS, but doesn't sound so easy here. Perhaps that's more because this is a new idea and not mature yet.
Everyone seems hot to SQL the file system, and while I think that will be the way of the future, I don't think that there is a clear view of how that works from the user's perspective yet. Remember that this is a rather large paradigm shift from what everyone is used to. It's going to take a while for this to mature to the point that Joe User is going to be able to hack it. I mean, I looked at the Save As dialog on that page, and while it looks cool it also looks counter-intuitive to me and I'm a developer! How much more will a user get confused?
All in all we're going in the right direction, but by no means are we anywhere near the goal yet.
Ben
Hierarchical file systems are as close to intuitive as you get. Everything you do in the real world, as pertains to dealing with information, mimics a hierarchical file system. Your chilton manuals are in the garage, your cookbooks and recipe boxes are in the kitchen or dining room, your computer books are by your computer. You don't look in the computer manual for how to change your oil. When you are trying to bake a cake, you don't walk out into the garage for inspiration. Having information organized into different places, and then having those places subdivided into different boxes is intuitive, and is how most organized people think.
v able\Yesterday\Tomorrow\A WeekAgoToday might be confusing, but the filesystem paradigm isn't.
1. (a) "We don't need no stinking filesystem." The ideal palmesque OS would have the same idea just demonstrated differently. You aren't going to open up your notepad to see an address. The address file is in the address program (directory). The schedule file is in the calendar program(directory). The programs you use to open the files become your folders.
1. (b) "Saving/Opening files should be transparent" The only people that would think like this in the real world have been living with someone that picks up after them all the time. When you are working on some (paper and pencil) project, and just stand up and walk away, do you exepect it to be available at the office tomorrow? When you start working on several projects in succession on your desk, and have reams of loose paper, can you easily bore your way back down. No, reasonable, organized people pick up the porject they are working on, file it away in the file cabinet/brief case/wherever it is supposed to go. There are logical beginnings and endings to your working on a project that only you can decide on. A spreadsheet, for example, do you want it to save every time you make a change... No, by their design, you would normally set up all your formulas, save that, and then every day/month/year open up the spreadsheet, plug the numbers, get the results, and save the specific results to a different file, or just look at the values produced. Not to mention, when you sit down at your desk in the morning, do you expect your desktop to know what project you want to work on? No, and you don't expect your computer to know what project you are working on either. Opening/Saving files shouldn't be and can't be transparent to the user.
I used to use a lot of floppies when growing up. I appropriated a lot of disks from other places. I used the "grab the black disk with the couple of remnant label pieces... no the other black disk... No, the one with the two small pieces of adhesive... Ooops, the one with the three pieces..." Now, I have to search all the disks everytime I want anything off of them, because I never labeled them. Saving things in well defined locations, for well defined tasks is reasonable, intuitive, and necesary task to saddle a user of any system/technology/information with.
2. I don't really need to address this point specifically, since the answer is inherent in the points above. The overly large filesystems are part of a whole system that the user doesn't really need to know about. That is why the "Desktop/..." paradigm of Windows came about, and is so useful. People working on your word processor have a reason to put the font files in one directory, the plugins in another, and the preferences in a third. The user couldn't care less. If you start the user in a directory tree just for them, then they won't be stuck in a huge file system, and can still work in a fashion that has made sense for litteraly thousands of years.
The filesystem paradigm has been around for a long time, again litterally thousands of years, because it works, it is easy, and it is how people think.
G:\Netowkrfilesystem\
Accounting\AccountsRecie
I've noticed about three main types of people in the world of open source: those who fix things, those who try to improve existings things (i.e., make it run faster, smaller, etc.) and those who like to tinker and make new stuff. This person seems to fit in the third category. As far as I can tell, this person is not so much trying to "fix" the file system, but to make a new and different version and/or approach to it. This may be a good thing. But if you don't like it, don't use it.
Life sucks, but death doesn't put out at all....
--Thomas J. Kopp
Russian puppets - forgot the name
Babushkas. If you want some, there's always Google.
Consider this: you save your spreadsheet today as "Yearly Report 2002", and two days later you want to call it back your mind just doesn't say "Yearly Report 2002", but more like "Financial Data last year". Then your nice database-filesystem won't find it either. Unless there is some serious AI backing it.
Now that would be an interesting file storage abstraction. I've played with the idea of a relational file structure, that would enable one to save meta-information on a file and later find it by information that relates to it. Implemented correctly, you could save your "Yearly Report 2001" and later find it by asking for "financial data two years ago". Something that combines newdocms and ThoughtTreasure.
ThoughtTreasureTM is a relational information storage handler combined with a (semi-)intelligent AI. You can supply information like "Peter loves Paul" and "Paul hates Cahtrine." You can then ask questions like "Who does Peter like?" and "What relationship are there between Paul and Cahtrine?" If you say stuff like "Peter dislikes Paul" it complains like "But I thought Peter loved Paul." But it goes far further than that. You can have it parse a movie review, and ask about information about the movie "Who directed Pulp Fiction? Who starred it?"
Combined with a file storage solution, this would open quite interesting, new forms of computer file storage.
Actually I would LOVE to have everything accessable in a database somehow. I've been wondering about something using the userfs stuff. Not really mounting a mysql database as a usermode filesystem but having information from the system available that way.
I've found myself many times wishing I could just type "select location,filename from datastore where contents like %resume%"
SQL comes much more naturally to me than the find command does. I would love an easier way to index the contents of everyfile on my system by an arbitrary number of metadata and then have that accessable via a simple sql statement.
I remember Scott Hacker did something similar with BeFS and his webserver at somepoint but he's long gone as is BeOS.
Am I the only one that this makes sense to?
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"