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Thinking about tag-based filesystems
A lot of UI interactions and classification flows are becoming tag-based. Our filesystems and URI's are the last hierarchical standouts we have that haven't adopted some form of tagging. Hierarchies make sense, and allow for different groups and subgroups to exist with their respective elements inside, however we sometimes have needs to share these files among other hierarchies so we delegate authority to the libraries on the system, or create symlinks across various paths.
Have there been attempts at tag-based filesystems? We already do symlinks, and have constructs in the UI's of some desktop environments for tagging documents as work/personal/financial, but what if the tag system also delegated role-based and scoped resource access per-process? What if the tag system could favor one library version over another, and the system could provide a default? It wouldn't be hard to imagine this going hand in hand with deterministic systems.
Initially, this thought experiment resulted in the idea of an imaginary Qubes or OpenBSD like system where each process or process group would have a role-based quota of resources based on different tagged attributes.
I don't have a product to pitch by this post, I'm genuinely asking for the thinkers and dreamers out there to think for a moment, if a tag is used over a hierarchy, what would a tag-based filesystem look like? how would it perform differently?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- GMoromisato 4y agoI believe GoogleDrive used to mostly be a tag-based system, where a tag is a folder. In other words, a file could be in any number of folders and there was no "preferred" folder. Recently, though, they've switched to having a single parent folder for every file (though you can still have references to the file in other folders). And I believe the reason for this was exactly because roles and permissions were hard to reason about. Still, I like the idea of a tag-based filesystem. If nothing else, I wish file types were represented as tags rather than extensions.
- aliqot 4y agoI like the idea too but am somewhat surprised that I haven't seen any mainstream discussion about this given the momentum tagging has in most other classification activities.