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RDF For Desktop Metadata?
claes writes "There is an article "Metadata for the desktop" that suggests that RDF should be used to describe data in desktop environments. This is an interesting idea. RDF is already used by Creative Commons to attach license metadata to its works. Mozilla also supports it.
RDF was designed for the web, but can it also find its way to the desktop? And what metadata is most important to describe?"
I am a big fan of implicit filesystem feedback. This can support all kinds of services from file sharing to most recently accessed search requests. Even fine tuning access controls in an RSBAC security policy.
The big concern is keeping this data protected and private. You dont want to share all of your metadata with everyone, so security of these systems should be something to look at carefully.
In short, Yes.
Say you have a digital photo. It's from a vacation you took in 2002, to hawaii, and contains photos of you, your partner, one of your children, but not your other kids and no pets. All that info could be kept as metadata of those pictures, and more.
The same can be done for finance info for the year 1999 for you, or 2001 for your partner, or music files bought from a certain place, by a certain artist and band.
While each of the filetypes above can have their own metadata (exif for images, comments for excel spreadsheets and mp3 tags for music) not all of it is singularly accessible and searchable by the one mechanism by the OS.
This is a good goal.
Forks? Would that be the NTFS streams?
I think the new filesystem WinFS in Longhorn is basically just an evolution of NTFS streams to make them more accessible for the users. They've always been there, just not very accessible besides a limited set of text fields in the file properties dialog box in Windows. (i.e. they've always been able to hold custom data and have custom key names)
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Actually, you can. To add a metadata item called "hidden.txt" to a file called picture.jpeg, just type on the command line:
notepad picture.jpeg:hidden.txt
Notepad should say that it "created the file." You should notice that no new files have been created: just look for them with explorer. But you can later open this "file" and read and edit it.
You can do this with any file with any metadata name.
Knowledge representation via "is-a" links has been tried, and it breaks down rather quickly. Read "Artificial Intelligence meets Natural Stupidity", by Drew McDermott, for a 20 year old critique of this concept. It's overkill for searching, and not powerful enough for reliable automated question answering.
The Cyc debacle illustrates how much work you have to put into tagging to get very little out. After twenty years of that money sink, it's still useless.