After playing around with Google's labels and liking it I thought about extending it for searching and finding items in Longhorn. In other words using metatags to replace folders in a file system. What are the benefits of this? Instead of file being lost in the folder structure, they can "float" and contain metatags that give each item meaning and context.
About the tags
Items can have default tags (time, disk address, place) or user defined tags (category, industry, playlists, music type) or system defined (file type, context associated with file type).
Some tagging could be provided via systems. If I purchase and download a song, the file can be tagged with multiple system tags (OS and Music System). Take the following example.
Here the first set of system tags from my laptop OS.
1. File type - mp3 (System tag)
2. Date - 08 Nov 2004 (Default Tag)
3. Location - GPS coordinates or a physical address: Atlanta, GA, USA (GPS Location points could also be translated to physical addresses via a service) Location on the file would not be the be "location" in the file system.
4. File size (System tag)
5. Disk Address (Default Tag)
And here, the next set is tagged by the music service.
6. Artist
7. Album
8. Track number
9. Duration
10. Rating
And I can add my tags.
11. Favorite
12. Rating
13. Music category
Tag linking or Tag relevance
In addition to meta tagging, meta tag linking could also be used to help create a context around one or more tags. That way I can put some context around files. I could view those relationships a tag links. Link maps could be used to show how you add relevance to your metatags.
Searching
Of course, if I want to find a file I need to a way to search for it.
For instance, take the following three tags:
14. Photos
15. 2004
16. Vacation
If I'm looking for vacation photos I could select some metatags and hit search. Here's a mock up of a result set with Photos as the primary metatag and Kids, Vacation, DC, Month and Year as secondary tags. Multiple primary tags could be used to refine your search or you could spin the axis to Vacation and see all items for vacation (email, bills, photos, maps, etc). The search view below should be easy to create using XAML and Longhorn. This is the first mockup. I'll create a XAML version of this also.
