Thinking about Meta-Data ...

Microsoft is including two important technologies into Windows Vista.  One, desktop search, has been done by everyone and their brother.  The other, virtual folders, has been done as well, but not to the degree that Microsoft is taking it. Just about every file in the computer can contain “meta-data”, which you can think of as information about your information.

The way Microsoft puts it; search is good, and important.  But it’s better to have not lost the file in the first place.  So in Windows Vista, rather than a “My Documents” folder where you’re supposed to store your files, there will be a “My Documents” virtual folder, which is actually the results of a hard drive search for your documents … wherever you happened to leave them.

You will also be able to make your own virtual folders, which is where this idea of meta-data comes from.  There’s only one problem as far as I see it … you have to add the meta-data to your files yourself.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes, I can hardly be bothered to give a file a really descriptive name.  Asking me to add keywords and other information to my file so that I can search for it later is asking a lot.  If the idea is to not lose the file in the first place, I’d just store everything in My Documents like I’m supposed to.

I’m thinking that there is a piece of the puzzle that Microsoft hasn’t mentioned yet.  For this gamble to pay off as big as they hope, there has to be a quick and painless way to add meta-data to files.  Many files, like MP3s, already have a lot of meta-data (the ID3 tag is meta-data), and some of that is generated automatically when you rip a CD, by pulling the information about the CD from a web database.  Perhaps Microsoft is going to be searching your data for keywords and adding them automatically, or even using those keywords to search their own databases for additional meta-data?

Probably not, but there has to be something else going on, because I’m pretty sure that Aunt Mildred isn’t going to spend hours annotating her recipes by adding meta-data so she can find her chocolate brownie recipe a few seconds faster next time.