Microsoft's Search Engine Plans 407
prostoalex writes "Andy Beal from SearchEngineGuide.com interviews Robert Scoble from Microsoft. Scoble tells the audience what current search technologies Microsoft is working on as part of its Longhorn/WinFS development as well as in the field of Internet. Scoble also discusses current problems with local drive and Internet searching, such as absence of metadata for a lot of files out there: "When I take pictures off of my Nikon, they have some metadata (for instance, inside the file is the date it was taken, along with the exposure information) but that metadata isn't useful for most human searches. For instance, how about if I wanted to search for "my wedding photos?" Neither X1, nor Windows XP's built in search would find your wedding photos. Why? Because they have useless names like DSC0001.jpg and there's no metadata that says they are wedding photos.""
I have a suggestion for em.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I have a suggestion for em.. (Score:2, Interesting)
I think they already are...
My site for a long time wasn't ranked on Google, MSN, yahoo! search. Then one day I was on the first page for Google. Amazingly enough, I was in exactly the same place on msn and yahoo searches. They all supposedly have their own crawlers, but why was it until I was listed on Google that I was listed on the rest? Just a theory I have...it probably means nothing.
Re:I have a suggestion for em.. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I have a suggestion for em.. (Score:5, Funny)
That's why the next version of Microsoft Photo[tm] will send every photo you make to the Microsoft headquarters so they can add the metadata for you.
Re:I have a suggestion for em.. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I have a suggestion for em.. (Score:5, Informative)
Search by date (Score:5, Interesting)
It's part of being human that we don't necessarily remember the phrase "wedding photos" but we may remember many other tiny pieces of data about a shoot that are unique to us, and the time and date are one of those. I can be certain the post 9pm photos done on those days are pretty embarassing.
Just concentrating on "Wedding Photos" is useful if someone else is searching my picture archive, but that's not useful to me
nude geekgrrls [210.50.72.38]
Re:Search by date (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Search by date (Score:5, Interesting)
To some extent Apple tried this with "Newton Intelligence" on the MessagePad. If you wrote "Thursday, Lunch with Bob at Redbones" It would (after you fixed all of its handwriting recognition mistakes) look up Bob and Redbones in the address book, look in the calendar for the next occurrence of a Thursday, and schedule a noon time appointment.
Newton Intelligence really only amounted to a small set of interapplication tricks, but it was assumed that as the popularity of the units increased, the functionality would be extended. (which pretty much tells you what happened to it.)
iPhoto - The Application Paradigm (Score:4, Interesting)
If the "smart desktop" idea catches on it will be interesting to see the response from developers on Mac OS X and Linux, as far as offering intelligent activity tracking. Somehow I see a twisty maze of documents and activities, all alike.
Should operating systems do all the work of organizing users files for them, concealing the filesystem behind a database veneer, or behind a purely task-oriented veneer? Should this kind of thing be left to application developers, like the maker of Path Finder?
Wouldn't Windows be more useful if it was a truly modular system that could be configured simply by stripping away unwanted components? Isn't that what makes Darwin so healthy in the enterprise market today?
Re:Search by date (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Search by date (Score:2)
give me a library of 10,000 photos I can scroll through. I bet I could quite easily pick some of the wedding ones. If those photos are organised by time photographed then they're all going to be packed together making it twice as easy.
I have more like 3,000 digital photos on my machine and I've never had a problem finding the ones I want. It can take a minute or two, but that is still an order of magnitude faster than I would with a box of printed
Re:Search by date (Score:3, Insightful)
-N
Re:Search by date (Score:3, Funny)
like, have the wedding photos in a 'wedding' folder or whatever, porno in 'porno' folder and wedding porno in 'wedding night' folder.
sure they can make it a nice categorizing system but wtf, why steam so much about it, are they going to bring it "up on your face" so that it's hard to ignore typing the metadata(most people would ignore it anywa
Re:Search by date (Score:4, Funny)
I'd like a camera that could accept voice metadata, turn it to text, and preserve it when it went onto the filesystem, using whatever metadata the filesystem supports.
That way I could easily hit the button on the camera, say "vacation with supermodel"[0], and search on that later. Although we'd need something more than ext{2,3} which could hold proper user-defined metadata.
Note 0: The simple metadata storage system would not have a lie detector. ;P
Re:Search by date (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, if you do have metadata available, you can do a lot with it.
Re:Search by date (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Search by date (Score:5, Funny)
I'm not buying it (Score:5, Insightful)
That's why you can change filenames and organize things into directories.
Re:I'm not buying it (Score:5, Interesting)
It doesnt need to be a morass of embedded folder after folder either, as humans have mental acuity unlike a computer. You may have uncle bob who is photographed a lot and auntie beryl who isn't, but all the photos of beryl you may know will contain bob. We can store a surprising amount of information, and perhaps 5 to 10 libraries is all you will need for most peoples collections.
Special occasions get their own. It just takes moments after downloading the photos.
nude geekgrrls [210.50.72.38]
Re:I'm not buying it (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I'm not buying it (Score:4, Funny)
I think they are wrong.
Even if they put more annoying pop-ups like "Hi, I'm Photi, your annoying photo-organiser! What are the names of the people on this photo?" I think people will go straight for the 'Ok' button. Especially if you take the number of pictures that can be stored on a memory card these days. Even clicking 'Ok' 50 times can be pretty annoying.
Re:Renaming files (Score:5, Insightful)
It's saved my bacon more than once. As we move away from text, we become completely dependent on metadata to find things. Standards for metadata need to be settled soon, or Moore's law means our computers will become less and less useful.
--Mike--
Re:Renaming files (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly what do you think metadata is? This system would require more text than current. At present, you can rename the files and put them in folders, which works quite well if you have any organizational ability. Metadata would require dozens of unrelated pieces of info be input, and the a more complex retrieval (search) process would be required. While metadata standards are important, it's only advanced users who will be using them. How many "typical" users do you know that are going to search for a photo by the F-value?
And for the record, I've never used the "containing text" search, because I name files in unambiguous ways.
Re:Renaming files (Score:3, Insightful)
I have taken to saving things on a samba share just so I can use locate and grep.
Re:I'm not buying it (Score:5, Insightful)
If M$ would work together with the industry and open up its data types we would come away with some really great new capabilities. This is incredible: they want 'the industry' to do what they never do, and I expect they will succeed. Prepare for the even more total domination of Microsoft in the near future.
Ouch (Score:5, Funny)
Right, dude! The camera should automagically recognize that it's taking pictures of your wedding and include that info in the metadata!
Re:Ouch (Score:2)
I am not sure how far this meta-data idea could go to capture the meaning of the snap or any other file for that matter. The same lazy user who dint take his/her time to organize her files in folders/providing proper file name will skip providing this metainformation.
Re:Ouch (Score:5, Interesting)
The closest thing to a workable scheme is Gelerntner's Lifestream stuff -- where your system knows that you got married on a certain date (even if you have trouble remembering it) and that documents (JPEGs, Word files, GNUCash transactions from that time probably pertain to it.
Re:Ouch (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
I dunno.
Re:Hmmmm... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hmmmm... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Hmmmm... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Hmmmm... (Score:3, Interesting)
Reminds me of Scotty's line, "The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drains." They've developed a complex solution for a simple problem that already had a simple solution.
While a database driven file system with the ability to let users define their own metadata fields in the databa
Re:Hmmmm... (Score:5, Informative)
for %a in (DSC*.JPG) do rename %a Wedding_%a
You just have to know a bit about the command shell...
Tom
Re:Hmmmm... (Score:3, Informative)
But for the average user with a digital camera, the software that comes with the camera normally has a batch rename function. I know my Nikon did and
Re:Hmmmm... (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem with this is an inherently one-dimensional view of the data. If you have placed your wedding photos in the weddings photo folder, you have not got the option of ordering photos by size, of easily finding facial photos or having some other property of your pictures you might want to use to get a subset of your existing picture bank.
Folder Names (Score:2)
C:\photos\1997\1997_01_05
which later morphed into
c:\photos\source\2003\20031205
Where you know what kind of image file (source vs altered, cropped, etc) then the year (to keep the directory listings reasonably short) then the YYYYMMDD to file by date.
Trivia: Most digital cameras roll over after 9999 photos, it gets annoying.
--Mike--
Re:Interesting behavior change with X1 (Score:2)
In an Internet far far away... (Score:2, Funny)
More from Darth Ballmer (Score:2)
Rebel leader: Ummm. I stored them on my XP machine. Due to an OS security flaw, the DiaNoga Worm (tm) got into my system and wiped the drive.
Darth Ballmer:. Ummmm. never mind. Assistant! Where are my dancing shoes?
Thumbnails (Score:5, Insightful)
Thumbnails don't scale! (Score:3, Interesting)
I store them by date photographed, using ThumbsPlus to view thumbnails and metadata stored in a database. So far, it's worked out for the 45Gb of photos I've taken in the past 5 years.
--Mike--
PS: Yes, I'll chat with and give ideas to anyone who wants to make this be
Re:Thumbnails don't scale! (Score:2)
I'm impressed (Score:5, Funny)
Manualy adding metadata to each of your 200+ wedding pictures looks so smarter than just creating an old fashioned directory "wedding pics" and moving them into it
I can't wait to start using this wonderful FS
Re:I'm impressed (Score:3, Insightful)
What if you wanted to find your favourite wedding pictures? Ones with your Mum & Dad in them? Ones with your wife in, but not necessarily from the wedding?
I'm a game developer. We have a lot of "materials" which describe how to shade surfaces. Our editor allows you to put the materials anywhere under a certain directory. That's nice, as it avoids having t
Re:I'm impressed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I'm impressed (Score:3, Informative)
Congrats, so revolutionary.
*rolls eyes*
More feature creep (Score:3, Interesting)
calendar based metadata (Score:3, Interesting)
Search results in Micro"Google" (Score:3, Funny)
search for "viral software" find Linux
search for "secure" find Windows XP
search for "handsome smart guy" find Bill Gates
Google has taste (Score:2)
Sorry (Score:2)
Image Subject Recognition (Score:2)
Google (Score:5, Insightful)
So instead of offering their official toolbar for IE only (the one for Mozilla [mozdev.org] is unofficial), start to slowly phase out the Google Toolbar and replace it with the Google Browser which would basically be a Google branded Mozilla Firebird [mozilla.org]. With all the features that make Firebird great like Tabbed Browsing, with the addition of the Google Toolbar features such as PageRank, etc. All on a cross platform basis.
If people get used to downloading better browsers now, then they won't even notice when the next release of IE starts to reject the Google Toolbar.
Let them know what you think [google.com]
Re:Google (Score:2)
As Mozilla Firebird already contains a Google searchbox, I doubt that this would count as 'innovation' either.
Re:Google (Score:2)
The idea is, people who downloaded the Google toolbar are a prime audience for a Google browser, that removes the IE tie-in for Google and increases the percentage of standards compliant browser users out there.
Plus Google could bring features from the toolbar that's currently not in Firebird such as PageRank (for some reason a lot of people like to know this info)
Re:Google (Score:3, Informative)
Appendix B.1 of the HTML 4.01 specification suggests that a conformal browser should have a mechanism for flagging errors; this does not apear to be the case with FB (although there is a 'side-effect mechanism as it is possible to visit validator.w3.org).
Re:Google (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Google (Score:3, Insightful)
An excellent idea. This could work well for Google and Mozilla. They can pitch "GoogleBrowser" or "GoogleWeb" as more secure, more feature-rich, and easier to use. Luckily, these things are already true, and Google won't have to do all that much development, beyond branding and optionally adding some google-specific enhancements.
useful dir names (Score:5, Insightful)
So what, the image file is named "DSC0001.JPG" -- who cares. Put it in a folder named "my images" and there's no wonder you can't find it!! Put it in a folder named "wedding photos", and then you've got something there!
The best way to describe it to the average joe (non)user is that directories/folders are analogous to folders in a filing cabinet. Would you file telephone bills, for example, under "mortgage" or "telephone"?
Thanks Microsoft for "my photos", and "my documents", and the like. We appreciate it!
Check out Phil Greenspun's similar idea (Score:4, Interesting)
for the hard of thinking.. (Score:2)
sharing proprietary formated data (Score:5, Insightful)
Share data? with whom? how can you share data that is in either proprietary format or "patented XML [xml-dev.com]" ???
It is following the OpenStandard that will help in "working together and sharing data".
What? (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean to say you don't know the date you got married? You're in trouble.... iPhoto on OS X at least breaks them out into folders according to either last imported and/or month/year etc.. You're responsible to breaking them down further, in which case you don't search the entire drive later, you simply open iPhoto and take a short trip to your wedding folder, just like having a folder in a drawer in a cabinet in your home.
It's not really that hard, now is it? if you're dropping any files onto your drive randomly, the issue is with your basic housekeeping, not that a top level search tool seems blind to your target.
You're talking about EXIF, and the list of data there is long. Why you took the picture isn't part of it, and if you want the camera to interpret which part of the subject matter is root (noses..faces...age...sex...background..,trees...
Microsoft Clientside Search:Road Signs for Spyware (Score:5, Insightful)
Would you want to trust your private data, gathered from govenment departments, purchases and financial transactions etc, being accessed by such a system run by any old govenmental or business agency?
How about your private correspondence on friends and acquaintances home computers.
Microsoft culled the URL name:password@ functionality from Internet Explorer because it claimed it could not create a secure enough fix, yet in the same month, it yet again proposes a privacy nightmare such as this? Madness.
WinFS sounds promising, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
WinFS sounds promising, but unless Microsoft makes the WinFS specs open and free, it'll be yet another lock-in technology, which would be very dissapointing.
Adding metadata to all your files would require a lot of time and effort, and if it's a closed technology, it'd be yet another reason people wouldn't want to even attempt switching to another OS. I can almost hear it now...
"This other OS looks cool, but I've spent so much time adding metadata to all my files, and I can't export that metadata to this other OS because the format is proprietary and patented... I'd better stick with Windows, switching OS's would be too hard..."
Sorry, someone had to state the blatantly obvious. As usual, all promising technologies coming out of Microsoft are poisoned. And most people don't even realize it. Not even intelligent people. Most .NET developers don't even realize that .NET's so-called "standardization" via ECMA doesn't really make it an open standard (lots of the "standardized" .NET technology is encumbered by patents).
-Teckla
Re:WinFS sounds promising, but... (Score:2)
However, Microsoft has intentionally broken compatbility or leveraged incompatibility so many times in the past that they have simply lost the ability to break compatibility and be given the benefit of the doubt any more.
Irony (Score:2, Funny)
Adding metadata is not the way (Score:5, Interesting)
Judiging from the interview, the "innovative" Longhorn seems to allow you to add metadata in a slightly user-friendly way. But virtually nobody will use it, except maybe to mark a few important files which you have stored in a special place anyway.
So what would be a better solution then? My idea is that metadata should be added automatically. For instance, a human will recognize most wedding photos for what they are. Getting a computer to recognize this is not trivial, but lots of research is currently invested in this. Already computers can easily recognize general categories ("groups of people", "nature", "animal", "portrait"). My guess is that it is already possible to implement a system that you can train to let the computer recognize your particular brand of photos.
I don't expect Microsoft to try to go into this way of innovation. They will probably wait until an entrepeneur develops it and then copy it or buy them out.
Bad example (Score:2, Insightful)
You know the date of your wedding right? If not, don't let your wife find out. You can search for jpegs taken on a certain date.
As you previously said...
When I take pictures off of my Nikon, they have some metadata (for instance, inside the file i
EXIF headers in .jpg files contain the metadata (Score:5, Informative)
I once made the mistake of working with these files under Windoze. After I was done, all the EXIF information had been removed. You can imagine how mad I was.
So what is Microsoft going to do? Fix this bug and call it a feature?
-Rick
That's the app you were using, not Windows (Score:4, Informative)
I use Windows (duck) and it preserves my metadata fine.
Re:EXIF headers in .jpg files contain the metadata (Score:5, Insightful)
If Dylan had a more common name, like, uhm...Mike... the value would go down. What would you do to include the names of the other 4 people in the photo? How do you link it to Dylan's other photos, etc?
--Mike--
Meta data is seductive, but its a fools method. (Score:4, Insightful)
Metadata is a stupid concept. It puts the cart before the horse. Files should not have to 'know' about themselves, they are not objects.
You have to treat files as just files, their names are nothing more than identifiers, their contents are nothing more than contents.
By all means its possible to build a great search capability into a filesystem, but you need to build the 'meta' data _outside_ the file.
A system built on file metadata is doomed to be incompatible with anything but the latest datatypes designed for it.
Re:Meta data is seductive, but its a fools method. (Score:2, Insightful)
"data outside the file"? That's what metadata *is*!
Re:Meta data is seductive, but its a fools method. (Score:2)
That whole post was quite illucid, but I think this line was about the problem the Mac had before? Files moved over the internet (UNIX's fault?) or to filesystems that don't support all the metadata lose their information.
You have to ask, how will WinFS support metadata on files downloaded off the internet? Will it warn me as I move files onto a FAT32 or EXT3 disk?
Re:Meta data is seductive, but its a fools method. (Score:2)
MS need to (un)fix their Find program... (Score:5, Insightful)
Now if you're in front of an XP machine and want to find say...all the pictures on the system you can't just enter in "*.JPG" anymore. You have to read what some animated dog is asking you, click on one of the options before you get to the search query window, then enter in the query. doesn't sound like much of a hassle, but it IS an extra step.
Re:MS need to (un)fix their Find program... (Score:2)
Re:MS need to (un)fix their Find program... (Score:5, Informative)
Hit Windows+F, click change preferences, click I want to search without an animated character.
Next click preferences again go to 'change files and folders search behaviour' then click advanced
Voilla, the find program is (un)fixed
Human entry errors are THE problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Metadata will NEVER improve searching in this way unless the things that generate the content FORCE you to put it in before they can snap pictures, etc...
Even if people were forced to put metadata into all their files there is a big chance that typos and other errors in entering the info would occur. This will make the metadata totally useless in a search!
Just organize your photos? (Score:2)
Find images like this (Score:5, Informative)
You can search images both in your own GIFT database and databases on the internet.
So to solve the wedding photo problem you could make a drawing similar to your photos and search for similar images.
My Bachelor Party (Score:3, Insightful)
Except it doesn't work that way. If I dig around a little, I see that I have the same images in several places: in the folder called "Vacation", another folder called "work" where I did some touchups, another folder called "staging" where I laid things out before putting them on the server, and again on the server, where my family can view them on the web.
If I follow the suggestion of putting them all into a single folder, then I've created a logistical headache. The _only_ thing I've gained is the ability to find all the files at once. Using metadata, I would no longer have that restriction - I could put files where they made the most sense, and still find all the files at once.
MS already does this and nobody uses it (Score:3, Interesting)
Does anyone really fill those in? Rarely.
Is there a method to search on them? Never looked.
Sometimes it's interesting to browse the properties page to see who really created a spreadsheet or document. For example, people who shamelessly "borrow" templates from former employers and either aren't smart enough or too lazy to do just a little clean up. But that's about it.
M$ search technology (Score:5, Funny)
Stefan
ACDSee has had this for years (Score:4, Insightful)
ACDsee, [acdsystems.com] a well-known and, at one time, free, image viewing and organising app, supports metadata. It puts it in a "descript.ion" text file in each directory. This is an ancient DOS standard. It's still supported by a few Windows apps, notably the Far manager [farmanager.com] (a shareware clone of Norton Commander for Win) and ReGet, [reget.com] a downloader; both Russian.
In fact I find the "descript.ion" metadata so useful I stick with apps that use it. At my last job, a web news site, I organised out image library using ACDsee and this metadata to add notes. ACDsee also has a nice batch rename.
No need to invent a whole bloody new file system to find your wedding photos.
Re:ACDSee has had this for years (Score:3, Informative)
Correction, it used to.
ACDSee 3.1 was quite intelligent, if it found DESCRIPT.ION files, it would automatically load the comments in. When you moved files to another folder, it would automatically create a new DESCRIPT.ION file in the destination folder.
Nice and simple, ne?
But, oh no, that's not good enough for the bright folks at ACDSee. Inst
No, no, no... (Score:3, Insightful)
from the article, Microsoft's Robert Scoble:
But, WinFS goes further than X1 and other file search tools do today. It lets you (and developers of apps you'll use) add metadata to your files. So, even if you don't change the name of your files, you might click on one of the faces in a picture application and get prompted to type a name and occasion. So, you would click on your cousin Joe's face, type in "Joe Smith" and "Wedding."
So Microsoft, who have sold many more graphical interfaces that anyone else on the planet, require you to "type in" Joe Smith for each and every photo of Joe you have !
Oh, sure, there'll be a dropdown list, but it'll surely list every last irrelevant person and topic you ever defined in WinFS.
Instead consider the following scenario: -
You've uploaded your latest batch of photos from your camera to your PC and have them in thumnails view in a file manager of your choice. -
Now you want to add your metadata, so you open up your "Meta topics" folder and select a number of graphical icons representing the subject matter of your photos, e.g. "Wedding", "Uncle Jim", "Mary-Jane" and some others. You then drag'n'drop these into a "Scratch" folder and close the "Meta topics" folder. So you now have the freshly-uploaded photos, and the relevant meta topics. -
Now select all the photos in the folder - they're all wedding photos, so drag'n'drop 'em onto the Wedding topic icon. -
Now select the photo of Uncle Jim staggering across the reception with a pint of special, and
Now the picture of Mary-Jane in her wedding hat - yeah, that's it baby - drop it on the pretty icon.. -
Now you can access all the Wedding photos by clicking on the wedding icon all the pictues of Uncle Jim by clicking the uncle jim icon and so on. -
There's even an interface to combine filters, e.g. Wedding AND (Uncle Jim OR Mary-Jane), simply by dragging and dropping the icons onto AND and OR icons in a cumulative fashion.
Now you can do all of this (bar the interface combine filters interface) TODAY, albeit in a fairly crude way, with a file system that supports symlinks (such as ext3), and a graphical file manager (say, Rox-FILER..). And here [f9.co.uk] is my claim to prior art in respect of this "graphical metadata manipulation" concept. Of course, I had to hold down Shift+Ctrl to make it do the symlinks when I dropped the photos on the relevent icon, which a proper interface wouldn't require. Also, a posix filesystem is not as elegant as say, a relational database for the purposes of storing the metadata. But hey, not bad for 5 minutes work. How long have Microsoft been working on this exactly ?
0 Hits for Linux (Score:3, Funny)
Define 'metadata' (Score:4, Interesting)
Doesn't storing your photos in hierarchical folders labeled appropriately count as metadata? I know it's not very flexible or powerful, but it's metadata of a sort. Store your wedding photos in a wedding folder in a photos folder.
Now, if you're talking about a database of metadata about files, then that's something else.
Apple's Solution (Score:4, Interesting)
Essentially, each of their iLife apps is a replacement for the Finder. Do we really need music search integrated with file search? Or is it sufficient to build independent metadata (ID3) and filestructure (playlists) just for music. That's really the brilliance of iTunes in that it never takes you back to your HD filestructure. You can even ask it to maintain the HD filestructure to reflect the metadata structure, so it'll keep everything in an artist/album/song structure, naming things as needed.
iPhoto is set up the same way, but it's pretty apparent that the iPhoto guys are the 'B' team, since they haven't gotten it nearly as slick as iTunes yet, but it also has the equivalent of content metadata, playlists, and smart playlists. So, yes, I can easily find my wedding photos. The trade-off is that you can't search for 'Wedding' in the Finder and get wedding photos, wedding songs, etc. Maybe that's upcoming, but I'm not totally convinced of the value.
The iTunes organizational structure does carry into iPhoto, so if you want to select a song for a slideshow in iPhoto, you can see your iTunes playlists, and filter against metadata. It also carries into iMovie, etc.
Other posters have clearly identified the problems with metadata. File organization is generallly only useful if you are willing to symlink across all of your metadata, otherwise your photos of you mom and your wedding photos are disjoint, since some should be in both places. The single biggest problem with metadata is putting it in to begin with. iPhoto now allows you to do that during photo import - using a slide-show type UI.
I think MSs tendency to do everything in one place is interesting, but tends to not come off so well. Having everything in SQL could eliminate one of the shortcomings in Apple's implementation which is that they need to maintain an XML intermediate structure for music files, photos, etc. While somewhat handy, it's main function is to join file metadata and the FS, which means that it is somewhat fragile.
Put a GPS in the camera (Score:3, Interesting)
Pros would love this; often you want to search some big image archive for pictures of a specific location. Tourists would find their photos self-organizing.
Lookup can then be by address, or using a map or globe. Think MapQuest.
This offers the possibility of a new (and totally legitimate) peer-to-peer application - location based picture-sharing. See the pictures others took of tourist locations.
Comment removed (Score:3, Funny)
PC based Google search application (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Slashdot luddites (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually no, the trick is incorporating it into the filesystem LOCKS YOU INTO USING THAT FILESYSTEM EXCLUSIVELY.
Your metadata would no longer relate to an image, it relates to a particular file on a particular filesystem. If you copy that file with anything other than Microsoft Magic Filesystem Aware Software (like, I dunno, a 3rd party FTP client) and your precious metadata goes up in smoke faster than "medicina
Re:Why not use an available metadata standard (Score:3, Insightful)
and are documented well enough that support can be implemented into your open-source imagebrowser or other app.
Unfortunately, they do not all support the kinds of information you may want to store. EXIF may miss a feature, JPEG2000 another one. The smallest common denominator is probably not desirable.
Besides, certain formats do not support metadata that well, or at all. But you may be forced to use those format