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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Automated meta-crap
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Anyway, if the file system itself had a concept of metadata, there are whole rafts of ways that metadata could get added to files without having users enter data into forms. Another one I talked about in the interview. What about if you had a QuarkXpress document. And you imported a picture. What if the QuarkXPress document had the words "Patrick's 10th Birthday." Wouldn't the file system be able to assume that "Patrick's 10th Birthday" could be associated with the file named DSCN6133.jpg that I had just imported? Isn't that metadata? Couldn't that be used to improve search? Shouldn't the photo come up now on searches for "Patrick's Birthday Photo?"
The problem with this scenario is the cases where it works badly. You could easily end up with files that have bogus metadata - and then have searches of your file system bring up some of the same crap that comes up on many Google searches. I have very, very little faith in auto-generated metadata - it's too easy to have tons of auto-crap
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