Moving on from trees (Score 1)

I believe the fundamental point here isn't about how to make trees work with symlinks, virtual folders etc. but finding a better paradigm for information storage.

We are accumulating more and more data on our hard drives - documents, music, photos, films etc. - and as we do so trees become less and less effective as a means to organise the data. Many of us probably have seperate photos and movies folders but suppose, for example, you've been on holiday and have a lot of photos and also a few movies you recorded while you were there. If you split these into the movies and photos folders then suddenly you break the connection between the files. If you create a holiday media folder then you can no longer rely on the photos folder to contain all your photos.

I've come across a couple of solutions to the problem. The first is what could be described as an attribute-based filing system, newdocms : files are assigned many attributes which can then be used to search and cluster the files. Unfortunately, the project seemed to die a sudden death at the end of January. Second, is Microsoft's research MyLifeBits project which has a similar concept but adds annotation and hyper-linking.

My personal view is that the answer lies somewhere in fuzzy sets but I haven't quite finished thinking things through yet...