My take on WinFS


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This is my take on WinFS:

WinFS is mainly about 3 things, it's about the structure, the relationships amongst this structure and a very powerfull search engine.

Structured data means no data islands... you get one contact list across all your different email applications,

you get one rss feed list across different rss reader programs... because in the end it's the same data! That's an

end user benefit right there... It's not about binary file data anymore, it has structure, an open schematized structure

that every application shares and takes advantage off. Did you read your rss feeds at work to find out that you need to read

them again when you get home? If they share the same repository there's no need for this to happen! Did you rate your music

in media player to find out it's all lost once you see it in any other player? There's no need for this to happen!

The notion of concept is all over WinFS, read on!

Relationships means that you get to relate this data in richer ways! Suppose you have a contact list with some of

your friends in there. The relation you have to those people is friendship... what does that mean?

That you share the same music interests? That you share some traveling interests? Suppose you specially

like Italy... one of your friends recently gone there and has some photos, would you like to know about it? You share the

same interest by Italy your friend does and you share a friendship relationship with him... See it's not about programs

making this kind of relationships all by themselves, it's not about the static data anymore, it's about the concepts, cause when

you have interest by the "place" italy, that's the same concept your friend has interest in, not just the same "name" for the

traveling place... And since what we have it's a concept and not a simple name, you can also find some info that's related

to the "place" italy because it also has some relationships with any other concepts. You specially like Italian food?

Visit that nice restaurant your friend was on in his vacations! Are we talking about the name of the restaurant here? No!

We're talking about the concept of the restaurant, so let's take a look at how my friend rated the food in this restaurant, hell,

let's take a look at how this food looks like and how much it costs... mmmmm looks like a nice place, let's book a reservation and

have a map with the location and driving directions to go along with it... Oh, I recieved an email message with the confirmation for

the reservation... is this just plain text? No! It's the concept of an appointment so please add it to my calendar!

Think of how difficult it is today to ask your computer to tell you all the things that are related to Italy that

you might find interesting. See... this last question illustrates how powerfull relationships can be...

In the end, we all end up with a huge amount of information on our hard drives... either it is photos, music, emails, calendar information,

personal information, work related items, small family movies, you name it! Desktop search might ease some of this pain, but in the

end it only knows about the structure of some documents (either it is images, emails, appointments, etc). Having a structure that

defines the concepts, and having the relationships amongst those concepts allows us for more than just "simple search" through our

items. I listen to alot of music, so do my friends. How can I know the name of the artists we like in common? And once I got the artist

how can I know the name of the song we all like? Is this possible using the actual technology? Music tracks normally are indexed

with a fair amount of metadata, and almost all indexing systems (think google desktop, msn desktop search) can read them fairly well.

But, where's the relation that says I like this music and so do my friends? This kind of search returns music items and those have a

relationship with artists that composed them, so, let's take all those music items that me and my friends enjoy, get the artists of those musics,

and present the user with some nice info that's related to them... isn't this cool? Perhaps you have a list of artists you really like in your

system. Since that search returns 'artists', any program that now wants to build up from your "favourite artists collection" can do it, either if

it is media player to make a personalized online radio or if it is a local concert tickets store that wants to notify you when you're favourite

artists are giving a show in town. They just know it's artists, not the name of the artists, the actual concept!

Think about it, it's your data, shouldn't you be able to access it and get the answers you want from it?

This is my take on WinFS... the only shame about it is that... it's not coming with Vista... because it's going to be awesome!

Just getting excited to be a part of the IT industry :)

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Well I'm sure sure in time Patition Magic will support it and we can just delete and create a new patition and load vista as usual (Long way from that though).

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