-=Metadata by Scott Wheeler=-

We've outgrown the traditional model for heirarchies.  There used to be only a few thousand files or a hundred settings for an operating system.  Is there something we should change?  Scott currently has about 30,000 files in his home directory, finding things is difficult.  On the internet things used to be hierarchical, FTP, Gopher, Yahoo, but that was quickly outgrown because there was too much data.  KControl, Windows Registry, Konqueror File Manager, Windows Control Panel and GConf are hierarchical.  The success of e.g. Google is that they make things easy to find.  Now it is easier to find things on the (huge) web than on our own computers.   

Scott defines meta data as anything we know about the document, the title, any datafields e.g. MP3 tagging but also data which can be extracted or implied from the contents of the file.

Settings are very hard to find in KDE (and other environments) even for us developers.  We can either remove settings, hide them (Windows Registry, GConf) or come up with a better way to approach them.  Hiding them helps users who didn't use many of the settings but doesn't help those of us who were able to hunt around or memorise settings.   

Search needs crawling, indexing, ranking and displaying. Crawling for files can be done with KIO which also has some metadata support but not much. Indexing can be done with KFileMetaInfo.  Ranking is by far the hardest element, by occurance is easy but not the best way.  Displaying search results should be integrated into standard file and settings tools, Konqueror and KFileDialogue.  Not something to add to them but a primary interface.  Apple has announced Spotlight but that is a separate tool, not integrated.  Saving should prompt to add metadata as well as the filename.  Text highlighting can help.  

Settings: search should become the primary interface in KControl.  

Unlike the web there are no links on the desktop.  Directories are the closest we have but they are a bad way to indicate relationships.  

Scott is mostly talking about vapourware at the moment, he would like to have something ready to use by KDE 4.