GLSCube - the semantic filesystem

[Saad Shakhshir]

so do u think the Internet would be more manageable if it were organized
like u said - heirarchically?  When was the last time you used Google Web
Directory (http://directory.google.com/ ) or something similar that tries to
organise websites into categories in order to find some information?
Sure... it works, but it's a heck of a lot slower than doing a
straightforward Google search.  Plus such organizational structures put the
onus on the user to sit and organize all their files.  If it's not the user
and it's some automated script, then what is the point.  Just make the
script/program more intelligent and interactive so that the user does not
need to worry at all about the underlying file structure.

To the user, it does not matter how the files are stored under the hood.
What is important is that an abstracted interface is provided that enables
them to retrieve the information they desire in a quick and intuitive
manner.  So if I want all my dance music by DJ Tiesto, I shouldn't have to
go to /home/user/music/dance/tiesto... first because it is more of a hassle
than just opening up a prompt and typing "dance music tiesto" and second
because not all my tiesto songs might be in that folder.  He has done lots
of songs with other DJ's and these might be stored under other folders, like
oakenfold or van buuren.  Tags are great because they allow you to have
multiple attributes per file - the user isn't constrained to put the file in
a single specific category.

I believe that automatically updating virtual folders based on search
strings and metadata are an invaluable addition to any OS and particularly
Ubuntu.  GLScube looks to be a step in that direction...

-SS-

On 7/11/06, John Richard Moser <nigelenki at comcast.net> wrote:
>
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>
> Saad Shakhshir wrote:
> [...]
> > more.  It is a solution that distances you from thinking about Where you
> > store your data to What your data is."
> [...]
>
> So instead of:
>
> /home/joe/music/mp3/artist/album/foo.mp3
>
> I have:
>
> joe's files ->
>   Music ->
>   MP3 ->
>   Artist ->
>   Album ->
>   Foo
>
> OR:
>
> Music ->
> (80 billion files, one of which is the song I want)
>
> Come on, guys, it's just more hierarchical indexing, just with more
> meta-data.  Taking away the real file system would only serve to make
> people access thing by keys, which would be difficult to control, then
> create more work, etc.
>
> You know what worked back in the day?  Media libraries.  You would have
> all these music files and videos stored in /home/joe/media/{music,video}
> and subdirectories for artist or album and the media library would go
> and find them all, index them automatically.  E-mail programs would also
> index all your e-mails, even though they're stored in a mail directory.
>
> I don't understand why people want to actually eliminate file
> hierarchical storage.  I tried to get the gtk guys to get rid of that
> stupid file picker; they said that you should have the few folders you
> use bookmarked.  I asked about when you have like
> /home/joe/audio/cd_collection/artist/album/ and just want to bookmark
> audio/ and go from there; they told me that's stupid, save the files
> straight in /home/joe/ and use something like beagle to find them.  Is
> this what we're trying to do?  Get a single directory of everything?
>
>
> - --
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> Public Domain, unless otherwise explicitly stated.
>
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