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?"

Re:Definition:...?

[ResidntGeek]

Yes.

Implicit feedback for filesystem information

[PureFiction]

I am a big fan of implicit filesystem feedback [peertech.org]. 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.

Re:Definition:...?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:What happened to forked files?

[Jugalator]

Forks? Would that be the NTFS streams [alcpress.com]?

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)

Re:What happened to forked files?

[k98sven]

While MacOS was at a disadvantage being one of the only ones to use it, wouldn't it have been an excellent advantage for ALL filesystems to be forked?

Well, one problem immediately springs to mind: The translation between different metadata formats. It's already a pain in the butt when using transferring files of not-so-popular types to the Mac.

The second gripe I have with the Mac is that it's so friggin' hard to edit the metadata. AFAIK you can't even do it on OS 9 without software. Now assuming the user is too stupid to change this manually is good. But not providing the ability at all, even for people who know what they're doing is just stupid.

(Windows first hides the extensions, then if you try to change them, it warns you first. That feels about right for me. - Not that extensions isn't a klugde.)

Apart from that, I agree.. anything is better than file extensions.

Re:Spotlight

[aristotle-dude]

I don't see how considering that Spotlight is a search technology that leverages metadata already existing in files on OSX today and this article talks about tagging files with metadata.

The search technology in Spotlight probably is inspired by live query from BeOS but first appeared at Apple in iTunes and later Preview for Panther.

Many former Be Inc. employees work at Apple now and some had worked at Apple before joining Be.

I have 300,000 files on my Windows box

[MichaelCrawford]

I know this because ad-aware tells me so when I have it scan all my disks.

The vast majority are very small files. How much more space would be required to give each one some RDF? And remember disk space is allocate in terms of sectors, or sometimes in blocks of several sectors, so small files waste proportionately more space.

And that's just on the Windows installation for my PC. I also have Slackware Linux and BeOS on other partitions. Quite likely there are very nearly a million files on my PC alone.

Re:FS support for metadata

[pizzarobot]

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.

Re:Many community websites don't permit RDF

[mlinksva]

You have another option -- put the RDF in a separate file and reference it with a link tag. See http://creativecommons.org/technology/metadata/ext end#link [creativecommons.org]

Watching the XML kiddies reinvent the wheel

[Animats]

It's fun watching the XML kiddies re-invent concepts from LISP. They just re-invented property lists, "is-a" links, and much of the baggage that made SGML painful.

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 [cyc.com] 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.

NTFS streams

[Otto]

This "metadata" is actually called an "NTFS stream" and has been around since at least NT4.

If you move the file around the NTFS drive, or from one NTFS drive to another, then yes, the metadata goes with it. If you move it to a FAT volume though, the metadata is lost forever. Not a huge deal as NTFS is getting more and more users nowadays.

XP uses these metadata streams to some degree, actually. Some of the things in the properties page for a file are actually NTFS streams.

Longhorn will make more extensive use of them, I'm certain.

Re:FS support for metadata

[zsau]

I think XFS does; at least, some versions of ROX-Filer are capable of writing additional metadata about the filetype on XFS drives. My understanding was that ReiserFS v 3.x can, but I've never seen anything that uses it. Of course, Reiser4 will be able to, but I think it and Longhorn have joined Duke Nukem Forever in a race to the bottom...