> It doesn't work because users are unwilling to go through and tag all their files.
I tend to agree -- in fact, I was just describing this very idea (that users will go in and mark up their all their content if we just give them the tools to do so) the other day here on HN as "the metadata delusion": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19515848
But it's important to note that tagging as the main usage scenario is envisioned by the linked article, not by those earlier RDBMS-as-filesystem projects. Those older projects assumed that much if not all of the metadata associated with data would be generated and managed by applications sitting on top of the database, using it as their data store. Users could add additional metadata if they wanted to, but they didn't have to for the system to be able to offer benefits.
The RDBMS-as-filesystem argument went more like this. If you want to be able to filter all your documents and only show the completed ones, then yes, allowing you to put a "done" tag on those documents is a crude way of doing that. But if all applications have access to a common data store, more sophisticated options become available, like letting developers build a workflow application that can read your documents and track changes, log approvals/change requests, etc. Then you wouldn't have to tag done documents "done"; you'd just use software to do your work, and your applications would teach the system what it means for a document to be "done".
(Of course, those older projects all fizzled out in the marketplace so we never got the chance to find out how these theories would have played out in practice.)
I tend to agree -- in fact, I was just describing this very idea (that users will go in and mark up their all their content if we just give them the tools to do so) the other day here on HN as "the metadata delusion": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19515848
But it's important to note that tagging as the main usage scenario is envisioned by the linked article, not by those earlier RDBMS-as-filesystem projects. Those older projects assumed that much if not all of the metadata associated with data would be generated and managed by applications sitting on top of the database, using it as their data store. Users could add additional metadata if they wanted to, but they didn't have to for the system to be able to offer benefits.
The RDBMS-as-filesystem argument went more like this. If you want to be able to filter all your documents and only show the completed ones, then yes, allowing you to put a "done" tag on those documents is a crude way of doing that. But if all applications have access to a common data store, more sophisticated options become available, like letting developers build a workflow application that can read your documents and track changes, log approvals/change requests, etc. Then you wouldn't have to tag done documents "done"; you'd just use software to do your work, and your applications would teach the system what it means for a document to be "done".
(Of course, those older projects all fizzled out in the marketplace so we never got the chance to find out how these theories would have played out in practice.)