Directories, Tagging and Desktop Search
Last time I touched upon Desktop Search in terms of how metadata should be used in the process, this time I would like to look further into the structure of the system itself and how that could be improved to facilitate search.
Desktop search is a subject that is pushing its way back into the limelight and all thanks to an online convention, tagging.
Microsoft have PHLAT and there are numerous other applications out there that allow you to tag files and then search through them. The idea is that a central database is created and then filled with tags and information about each file so that more data is available to the search application.
One important note about tagging that only really hit me while reading the new face of tagging was that tags can be seperated into two broad categories, descriptive and contextual, the former provides information about the data that has been tagged e.g. in a photo a tag might be the photographer or who is in the photo. Contextual tags however provide information about the item that has been tagged e.g. in a photo a contextual tag might be “to-crop” or “to-edit”.
The major difference between the two types of tag is their mutability, descriptive tags are immutable where as contextual tags last as long as the context e.g. once the photo has been edited the tag can be removed and a new tag “complete” can be used.
But tagging has its problems, the tags are invisible which means that manual search isn’t improved, this can only be done through the appropriate use of directories.
In my home directory, for example, I have a folder called “Music” and in this folder I keep all my music files, each artist has their own directory, and in each artist directory there are album directories and in these are the actual music files. Now, because they are sorted this way it makes moving the library around very easy and it means that music players can easily find my entire collection. This is an example of a situation where tagging just isn’t appropriate.
Photo Files
Lets look at another example, photo albums, whenever I have a collection of photos a new directory is created with the name and, if applicable, the date of the album, then the photos are placed in there, the photos themselves are named in a specific way, <name>_<location>_<date>.file type, this helps me when I am manually browsing the files.
Decentralised Data
The next step would be to use an application to tag the files so that I could easily find similar photos, what would be ideal is if the photo files aloud me to add information such as who is in the photograph, where it was taken and who took it. I am aware that many file types do allow for a degree of metadata but I have yet to find a suitable format, but that is for a future blog post.