Re: “I’ll try to post a few compelling scenarios in the next week. The foundation for them all, of course, is WinFS“ in http://blogs.msdn.com/jmazner/archive/2004/02/16/74595.aspx
To quibble with my good friend Jeremy (little known fact: did you know Jeremy used to be SteveB's speech writer?),
The foundation may be/is WinFS but *the answer* is in the LH Shell and how people will work.
The LH shell folks have done some amazing work providing capabilities for relating a group of items with another group of items. I say “some” because there is still a lot more to do. It's the shell (and not WinFS) that is going to impact users ability to create relationships between items. (Note: start thinking of this as a problem of “creating relationships between items” and not about assigning traditional meta properties to a single item.)
“Any day now”, there is going to be a new MS IT Showcase white paper appear @ http://www.microsoft.com/technet/itshowcase called “Microsoft Web Enterprise Portal” - one of three techncial white papers about Microsoft's internal deployment of SharePoint Portal Server 2003.
It describes how SharePoint is deployed and being used to create specific “places“ on the MS intranet for people to gather and do work (e.g. team sites, document and meeting workspaces, My Sites, etc.). A lot of contextual information is gathered when these sites are created and hence, the content created in these sites automatically inherit that context (aka metacrap - there must be a great acronym hiding in this word). Instead of having to encourage people to contribute their explicit knowledge, it's now captured organizationally simply by the way people work.
Here's a bit of a picture of what this looks like:
