Semantics, Tagging, File systems, Tools, tagstore (was: [Orgmode] Re: contact management in org-mode?)

[Karl Voit <devnull@Karl-Voit.at>]

* Russell Adams <RLAdams@AdamsInfoServ.Com> wrote:
>
> On the semantic note, I found a utility called tmsu recently
> (http://tmsu.org/) which allows semantic tagging of files. There was a
> cool looking filesystem called Tagsistant too, but it unfortunately
> appears abandoned.

I was doing research for four years and I am writing a dissertation
exactly about this topic. For my research, I created [1]. From my
perspective: there is nothing practical out there to tag files on
the file system layer.

There were "Semantic File System", "TagFS", "SemFS", and many more.
All of them either abandoned or never made it to stable. 

Nepomuk/KDE seems to be the most promising but I am not up to date
on Nepomuk any more.

For OS X there are some add-ons which more or less try to integrate
into the system. But chances are high that Apple will change from
HFS+ to probably ZFS. Apple officially never supported the streams
of HFS+ and therefore I am afraid, any tags stored there will get
lost some day.

Microsoft and Google do not want to support multi-classification. I
was talking to several guys on conferences. Apple never shows up.

tagstore [1] works on all platforms but is only scalable up to a few
thousand items (files or folders) because of inode limit. If you are
using tagstore on a file system with no inode limit, it might be a
cool solution for you as well.

All in all: no solution that satisfies everybody. Yet.

My solution for now: many things are organized in Org-mode where I
can link and tag things. Memacs I do like *very* much for this
purpose: [2]

If you need something for tagging which is compatible with *any*
application out there and you do not need more than a few thousand
items, tagstore should be fine as well. For example for movies it
should be cool in any case.

If you need more infos, you can wait for my PhD to be finished
(2012-11). It should contain all relevant information or at least a
link to other documents that contain the answer to your questions
related to the topic of retrieving files using navigation.

  1. http://tagstore.org
  2. https://github.com/novoid/Memacs

PS: Sorry for the shameless plug but you asked for it :-)

-- 
Karl Voit