Of course, what you want is understood. Put on your OS designer hat and let's think this through. A generalized capability for persistent data with universal s

Of course, what you want is understood. Put on your OS designer hat and let's think this through. A generalized capability for persistent data with universal semantics -- the analog of the magical universal driver for networked IPC -- is a design brief for a generalized database. So your first decision is 'how is the data organized'? Given the generality of the brief, the optimal candidate is a graph of documents. So a graph database that would allow arbitrary, semantic, linkages between files. So now we need to get a handle on the semantics. At the individual document level, the OS will need to provide some sort of type system for data, the equiv of your example of types in languages. Then we need a generalized mechanism to allow for creation of higher level semantics -- the bits that semantically relate doc A to doc B. These would be the arcs of the graph. So now we're looking at something like RDF. https://www.w3.org/RDF/ https://www.w3.org/RDF/ https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Metadata https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Metadata Will this be a freaking cool OS? Definitely. Will it be performant? TBD, but obviously not as performant as the current state of affairs. And that's only the mechanisms aspect of it. You will still need to address all the issues related to 'shared/universal semantics' that the Semantic Web people have to deal with. At that point you the OS designer need to ask yourself if this is a reasonable task for the OS.