Some time ago, I designed the TaggedDatabaseFileSystem, my approach at making ‘/mail/new’ equal ‘/new/mail’, at least in theory. Since then, I’ve modifiued my design to add taxonomy such as key-value pairs, for faceted classification and facet mapping. Now it seems that the idea is finally kicking in.
Basically, my idea contunes the use of POSIX-like paths to build filters. ‘/’ shows all, and ‘/mail/new’ uses the AND operator; an intersection of all tags. For key-value pairs, ‘/type:mail/status:new’, and so forth.
The facet mapping concept is even cooler, where not only do you get the results, you get things that you could add to the query to return less than the current number of results while returning at least 1 item. It’s like ’0 > n > c’, n = new number of results, c = current number of results. The facet mapping gives the user the ability to do progressive filtering.
Though maybe Apple is right: users are lazy and we should look at the content for our metadata. So that the metadata is in the data itself. Perhaps, but my philosophy is that of dynamic metadata and static data – each having its own protocol, respectively. Thus, we’ve got Project nuWeb. Alas, I digress.
