Re: Hierarchical tag structure in SetFS

On 2007-03-02, Sam Mason <[email protected]> wrote:
> Yes, I think you are right here.  It would be a very powerful
> organisational tool for this sort of thing, I can imagine some very good
> interfaces based on this concept.  In terms of using it as a general
> file system, I'm not sure how well it would scale (in human terms of
> coming up with meaningful tags) past a few thousand objects/files.

One needs to experiment. The hierarchical FS does also have a 
scalability problem to huge amounts of data. No single naming
scheme can resolve that well: you need some kind of search
functionality for lots of data. But you still want to be able
to give meaningful names/identies to many things as well. At 
least I do.

Come to think of it, perhaps people are going the wrong way
about database file systems: implementing them on top of a
conventional FS, giving useless names to the files under the
database file system's control. Perhaps it would be better
to have at the bottom an unorganised data store with only
abstract identies for objects, and then have additional 
systems on top of that providing names to things that need
them: traditional hierarchical, setfs-style, whatever fits
the application. Files could have names in multiple systems,
and Not every file would need to have an identity in any of 
these systems (except one providing access to the files with
the meaningless identifiers in an uniform manner). They would
have to be found through an indexing service, and possibly 
given meaningful names in one of the naming systems if needed.

-- 
Tuomo