Re: Things that Longhorn seems to be doing right

Timothy Miller
2003-10-31T16:36:40Z

Scott Robert Ladd wrote:

>
> Another problem with metadata is that it is largely generated by the
> user, who is notoriously lazy. A truly powerful system would use
> contextual analysis and other algorithms to automatically generate
> metadata, freeing the user from an onerous task (which is what computers
> should do). Certainly, some search engiens are bordering on this
> capability.
>

There is a French company called Pertimm which develops a search engine
that does this with documents. It even does cross-language queries
based on sophistocated linguistic analysis. Often, I wish google had
some of those features, if even a primitive synonym table.

The relevance here, though, is that the Pertimm index is much larger
than the actual text that be being indexed. That's not a problem,
really, because the same is true for google. You need that for
efficient searches. But there is no place for such a thing in a file
system. I don't think any Linux developers would want the metadata to
even APPROACH the size of the file data, let alone get LARGER.

Indexing of this sort has its place, but applying it to a whole file
system is much too broad of a use. For instance, you wouldn't want to
index the contents of your binary programs, or even shell scripts for
that matter. So text, data, and code need to have different kinds of
indexing.