In case you want another link to a good Jorn Barger explanation of why XML, and all container-based hierarchies don't really work, here it is. This is exactly what I was trying to think about this weekend. I might be getting somewhere in the sense that the question is coming into focus. Getting the question right seems like at least 85% of the battle (according to my top secret rigorous scientific testing....) Anyway, what I want is something like atomic storage of all "digital media bits" (as if they can all be classified together like that) and then a dynamic containerization (hierarchicalization? folderizing? treeifying?) of these bits depending on the context of the question I'm asking. Here's an example: I have a picture of MB I took this weekend. It is one of, say, 35,000 pictures I have on my computer. I store it in a directory structure that looks like this "/documents/travel/2001/january/montauk/pictures". This looks good. My hierarchy at least has several levels, so it's clearly a step up from having all 35,000 files in one folder called "/pictures". But now imagine that next year for MBs birthday I want to go back and pull up all the photos of her to make a little collage. In that case I'd would have wanted the picture filed in "/documents/photos/friends/MB". D'oh. And worse, for practically every situation I can think of, I would want the file hierarchy to have been different. So that is the problem, and the solution (at this point in time) seems to me to involve storing all the files (what I called "digital media bits" above) in a giant blob, or cloud, or .net, or whatever you want to call this non-hierarchical storage space. And then I want tools that dip into this storage space (I guess "cloud" is the most popular term right now) and construct container based (i.e., folders inside folders like /documents/travel/2001/january/) file hierarchies based on the context of the question I'm asking ("Select all pictures from january 2001" gets you one type of file hierarchy - namely, /pictures/2001/january - while "select all pictures of MB from the last year" gets you a different one - "/pictures/mb/2000/".) Of course, this amounts to something like teaching the computer how to think, so I'm not saying I have any insight into how to generate these on the fly hierarchies. But you have to have something to think about.
|
- jim 1-15-2001 6:35 pm