FolkOS: Folksonomy Operating System

We were used to organize our bookmarks in folders, then del.icio.us came and we now appreciate folksonomies (flat taxonomies, just a set of free keywords you can attach to URLs). We are used to operating systems that allow us to categorize files (knowledge) on folders, would it make sense to have an operating system that allows us to categorize files only based on taxonomy (just add keywords to any file, all the files are in a flat pool)? I don’t know.
What I know is that the total lack of concurrency in the Operating Systems domain (actually just one global monopoly) is depriving all of us of new ideas, new paradigms, progress. If you compare it with the vibrant Web, where a new idea gets implemented and proposed almost daily, you can maybe see how far we would be if there were a free market for Operating Systems.
Anyway, how could we call it? What about FolkOS? FolkOS, the Folksonomy Operating System, I can already see the advertisements…. And, yes, I patented the idea, I got every possible TradeMark and not only on Earth. I patented FolkOS also on Venus and Alpha Centauri (venusians and alphacentaurians be aware! Don’t use my patented ideas! I have the best lawyers of the galaxy!).
[I tend to overload my emails of smilies (for expressing when I’m joking) but I don’t like them on blog posts, so I’m not sure my 4 readers understand when I (try to) make a joke. So, just to be sure, this is a joke … I think patenting computational ideas is a total nonsense (maybe a video can help in understanding why)].

6 thoughts on “FolkOS: Folksonomy Operating System

  1. Zbigniew Lukasiak

    Recently many people talk and think about tags, and me too. It all goes around information storage and retrieval and if one thinks about the basic concepts in this field one unevitably goes to filesystems. So here is my idea about a file system based on tagging. The beginning is simple – substitute tags for directories. So you click on a tag and see all files that are associated with this tag. But there might be too many of such files and you need other tags to reduce that list, for this you need to split the display and on the top most plane you put all tags that are associated with any of the files from the bottom plane. Then you need another plane for the list of all currently choosen tags – using it you could thraw away any of the choosen tags and the two other planes would immediately reflect the change. I think this could be quite usable file storage. Can it be fast?

    That is a not finished thought. How does it relate to Hans Reiser ideas from the ‘white paper’? I feel like what I presented here is more a Tag File Manager than a file system, but it could be based on a file system similar to that developed by Hans Reiser. Or can it be implemented with simlinks?

    But in the end I think all we need is an indexed browser cache, so that we could full text search all the pages we have seen.

    This is really synchronistic: http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2005/02/17/facetious.php

  2. Zbigniew Lukasiak

    Recently many people talk and think about tags, and me too. It all goes around information storage and retrieval and if one thinks about the basic concepts in this field one unevitably goes to filesystems. So here is my idea about a file system based on tagging. The beginning is simple – substitute tags for directories. So you click on a tag and see all files that are associated with this tag. But there might be too many of such files and you need other tags to reduce that list, for this you need to split the display and on the top most plane you put all tags that are associated with any of the files from the bottom plane. Then you need another plane for the list of all currently choosen tags – using it you could thraw away any of the choosen tags and the two other planes would immediately reflect the change. I think this could be quite usable file storage. Can it be fast?

    That is a not finished thought. How does it relate to Hans Reiser ideas from the ‘white paper’? I feel like what I presented here is more a Tag File Manager than a file system, but it could be based on a file system similar to that developed by Hans Reiser. Or can it be implemented with simlinks?

    But in the end I think all we need is an indexed browser cache, so that we could full text search all the pages we have seen.

    This is really synchronistic: http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2005/02/17/facetious.php

    From my wiki: http://zby.aster.net.pl/kwiki/index.cgi?TagFileSystem.

  3. Marco

    Unless I don’t understand what you’re proposing – or it is much more far-fetching than I would dare to – I reckon FolkOS would miss one important feature of folksonomies: the folks :-)

    In decent OSes (no Windows 9x don’t count as such) each user handles its files indipendently of other users. So, yes, here you would tag your own files rather than confining them in directories. But the tag system would not get any benefit/disadvantage from interaction with other users, because these interactions are prohibited by the OS. In one sentence: you have facets but lack folks.

    So, I would propose a renaming: TagsOS or, better, TagsFS (for tags-based File System). Sorry for all those patents and trademarks… ;-)

    More seriously, note that tags are actually been available for a while (e.g., nautilus comes kinda close to that having the concept of “emblems”). Recently, however, there seem to have been a shift toward full-text search (google desktop, beagle [http://www.gnome.org/projects/beagle/], etc.).
    I believe that the combination of tags and full search would be extremely useful, and, not surprisingly, I’m not the only one thinking this [http://tagsonomy.com/index.php/tim-bray-asks-the-right-question-and-i-start-to-answer-it/].

  4. paolo

    very good points! my replies:
    (1) maybe in future your operating system (yes, powered by google) will allow you to “share” portions of your hard disk. [use case: i subscribe to a feed of files categorized under “blog_stuff” and I see all the files on all the user machines of the world (and you were speaking of information overload with the Web? ;-) ]
    (2) anyway the “lack of folks” is what happen also on gmail (you can tag your own emails but nobody else will see them) and if google is using it for emails, can they be wrong? of course not ;-)
    (3) my patents automatically extend to sibling ideas so I extend my patent portfolio to TagsOS and TagsFS as well ;-)
    (4) i should reply more seriously, at least on my blog … ;-}

  5. Anonymous

    So that I can say I have the last word:
    1) Your point (1) reminds me of a thing called filesharing. Back in the beginnings of the 2000’s it used to be a popular application, often implemented through P2P technologies. It had some trouble with the people from the music and movie industries, but, now that it is powered by Google it is all fine and well ;-)
    2) As of your point (2), yes, gmail uses tags, but, no, it is not called folksmail ;-) (they would loose the ‘G’ factor, for one thing)
    3) No wait, damn patents on computational ideas! RMS was right, after all

  6. Riccardo (Bru)

    Great discussion!
    Actually, as Marco mentioned above, the introduction of real-time full text desktop search engines, like google desktop search or, for us Mac heads, Spotlight, radically changes the way to interact with a filesystem, so much so that it gets more and more close to the structure/experience that internet has in the eyes of a common internet user (google to access data in the first place, and then websites acting as “application” through which manipulate data)

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