Tag based file system

Question

All OSs that exist right now work in files and folders. I was thinking that there are may other ways of storing files. Would it be a better way to store files by tags, for example:

A file called "music1" can have a tag "2013", if the music was made in 2013. The same file can have another tag called "Music", to say that the file is music, another file called "video1" could have the "2013" tag, but also have the "Video" tag instead of the "Music" one. This would be useful, because you could search for tags and generate nice-looking maps of all the files you have.

Here is an example:

enter image description here

In this example, files are in green. Each file has some tags(blue),and some special tags(red). Special tags contain things like the user(only the user in the tag can see files tagged USER:Username) and File type(instead of file extension). Tags in yellow are system filetypes that do not require a program to run them(like .exe in windows)

Black lines link tags to files
Red lines link special tags to files
Blue lines link what the file type(or file) is opened by. For example, the music is an ogg file. It is opened by OggViewer, which is a jar file opened by java. Java is opened by the system.

[TagSpaces](http://www.tagspaces.org/) is open source, runs offline, and models the tags you use in Evernote. — Dan Dascalescu, Apr 28 '15 at 03:33
What your are looking for is called a [semantic file system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_file_system). There is also a detailed [blog post](https://www.nayuki.io/page/designing-better-file-organization-around-tags-not-hierarchies#hierarchical-organization-is-clumsy) on the subject — GRASBOCK, Feb 22 '22 at 22:42

score 5 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 24 '13 at 12:01

5

As far as I know, there is a nice file system level solution to your need called NHFS or nonhierarchical file system. Also available a FUSE based mountable file system called TMSU that may satisfy you.

answered Oct 24 '13 at 12:01

shvahabi

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score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 15 '13 at 03:11

It could have merit, for example I'm utterly disinterested in the file names/paths of my tens of thousands of music files; I only really care about the artist,title,album,year,etc of them, which is the way my music player (quodlibet) displays them. Choosing a set of music to put on another device or to send to someone could then be as easily as selecting an album (instead of browing to /home/me/music/who/knows/what/someartist - somealbum).

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 11 '14 at 07:59

There is TagsForAll for windows. It is a file manager based on tags. Tags can have hierarchical structure. User interface is very simple but nice. Free version fully functional and save tags in database, Pro version save tags also within NTFS stream to a file.

score 2 · Answer 4 · answered Mar 15 '13 at 02:34

2

Microsoft tried to do something like that with WinFS but gave up on it. It would be great if they could get it to work.

answered Mar 15 '13 at 02:34

Thomas Oeser

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score 2 · Answer 5 · answered Jun 25 '13 at 11:36

There are some other (old, archived) projects implement this idea:

Only the last seems to be releasing recent versions.

score 1 · Answer 6 · answered Oct 15 '14 at 00:05

I think the idea has a future. I've pondered this same idea before. And tags fundamentally work better for most content than folders do; however, I wonder if the hierarchical structure of folders isn't actually better suited for files. In other words, though I like the idea of using tags on many levels I wonder if it would actually increase the overall complexity. For example, consider how tags could be used successfully to manage versioned software libraries. I'm afraid we won't know the answer until someone starts using the concept instead of folders for an entire OS. It'll be interesting to see/try.

Tag based file system

6 Answers6