Jon Udell questions the value and direction of WinFS

re: Jon Udell questions the value and direction of WinFS

Shannon J Hager — Tue, 08 Jun 2004 06:37:00 GMT

What I want to know is this:

If I have a Vanilla Ice vs. The Strokes Remix/mash-up by Freelance Hellraiser called "Last Night Ice Ice Baby Saved My Life", will I be able to find it in a "stack" (or virtual folder) by looking for any of the 3 artists, by "rap", by "rock", and by "remix"? If not, then WinFS needs to be thought out a little more.

Right now, I have to choose a single folder to put it in. I made a content management system a few years ago that worked with virtual folders (although the user never knew it) allowing a document to be placed in any number of folders at the same time. For instance, a photo of myself could be in both "Users> Shannon> Photos> Me" and "Assets> Photos> Staff> Shannon".

I see WinFS as working somewhat similar to that but in a more automated fashion (instead of having to manually add the photo above to both folders when uploading to the system).

Am I off base?

re: Jon Udell questions the value and direction of WinFS

Dare Obasanjo — Tue, 08 Jun 2004 08:29:00 GMT

Jeremy,
You missed his point almost completely.

re: Jon Udell questions the value and direction of WinFS

Alex James — Tue, 08 Jun 2004 08:34:00 GMT

Jeremy,

I remember giving almost exactly the same example to you:

<full text search doesn't help at all, because “Longhorn“ and “Infoworld“ likely never appear together in any document>

just with different keywords, back in September/October last year, when talking about 'Save With' instead of 'Save As' and still agree completely.

I think the main problem facing Microsoft and you in particular is to provide powerful demonstrations of the power of WinFS. Since it a Conceptual sell, not a standard benefits sell. Your Scenarios are just the first step I think...

I decided to stop working on my Relational File System after seeing WinFS... because:
1) WinFS looked like it was going to be significantly better technically.
2) But more importantly it was so hard to explain to customers, even MS is going to struggle to explain it the benefits to consumers, and you and MS have 2 years to do so.

Good luck.
Alex

re: Jon Udell questions the value and direction of WinFS

Mario Goebbels — Tue, 08 Jun 2004 10:54:00 GMT

<<If I have a Vanilla Ice vs. The Strokes Remix/mash-up by Freelance Hellraiser called "Last Night Ice Ice Baby Saved My Life", will I be able to find it in a "stack" (or virtual folder) by looking for any of the 3 artists, by "rap", by "rock", and by "remix"? If not, then WinFS needs to be thought out a little more.>>

Currently, the Gerne field in the schema is only defined as dummy, but if they'll be adding an array of enums (or maybe going to implement it using Genre objects and relationships), then nothing speaks against your idea, means finding the same file in three different stacks.

Using an enum doesn't seem that effective to me. As already suggested above, having the ability to create Genre objects and then create a relationship between the actual song and the genre object, offers a lot more flexibility, since I could define my own music genres, or as Shannon suggested, apply multiple genres to one song. Where can I submit this idea, Jeremy? ;)

re: Jon Udell questions the value and direction of WinFS

David — Tue, 08 Jun 2004 17:33:00 GMT

Next time, try reading the article before you respond to it.

Where does he contend that "full text search over XML files is good enough"? His example uses XPath to search for all documents with a given keyword. Given a standard XML schema for audio metadata, a similar XPath query could find all Jazz albums.

As for WinFS's support for XML APIs: exporting a file to XML is a far cry from native global XPath searching. That PowerPoint presentation you linked doesn't mention any support for XML APIs (unless you count an "XML" rectangle in the API box with no accompanying explanation, or a line saying that WinFS will support XML import/export).

You say that "What you want is a common storage engine, and you want a shared schema with strongly typed metadata." That's what Udell wants too. But he wants it implemented using existing standards, and Microsoft wants to do it all their way.

re: Jon Udell questions the value and direction of WinFS

roger — Tue, 08 Jun 2004 23:49:00 GMT

Today’s Windows file system cannot be trusted to remember where I put a file (location of icon in window) or even that I wanted the window to be displayed in the graphical icon mode. Why should I look forward to trusting a future Windows file system with even more information?
(Yes, I know that is an available feature ... What I do not know is how to fix a system after that feature breaks).

rdf vs WinFS - Part I

Marc's Voice — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 13:05:00 GMT

I've been waiting for this battle to ensue.

re: Jon Udell questions the value and direction of WinFS

Pete King — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 13:37:00 GMT

Excellent rebuttal and well thought out. Some of the other commenters need to go back and read Jon's blog entry as he does indeed assert that full text search is good enough.

re: Jon Udell questions the value and direction of WinFS

David — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 17:06:00 GMT

Pete: where does he assert that? I reread the article and all I saw was a statement that "The power of pervasive free-text search, by the way, is something that Microsoft seems consistently to underestimate," which is not the same thing.

re: Jon Udell questions the value and direction of WinFS

Robb Beal — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 18:07:00 GMT

Jeremy: "Perhaps Jon's point is that the file format of the music itself should support XML, and we should replace .mp3 with a pretend new XML-media file format, .xm3."

Think file-format independent XML metadata where the association between data (eg, the mp3 bits) and the metadata is made via a file-system directory,

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2003/03/05.html#a627

Danny Ayers on WinFS and RDF/semantic web

TrackBack — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 17:29:00 GMT

Danny Ayers on WinFS and RDF/semantic web

Scoble

TrackBack — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 21:10:00 GMT

Scoble

re: Jon Udell questions the value and direction of WinFS

Evelyn Rodriguez — Fri, 11 Jun 2004 17:59:00 GMT

'If we're doing a bad job about explaining the end-user benefits of WinFS, keep in mind that so far we've tried to really focus the message on developers, since it will be a while still before a home user needs to think about Longhorn.'

OK, let's say you are coming from the business side (with deep technology knowledge, but not hard-core developer) and trying to understand Longhorn so you can decide if you want to put resources into Longhorn development. I do think end-user benefits would be important to understand the bigger business value picture.

MasterMaq

TrackBack — Fri, 11 Jun 2004 20:16:00 GMT

MasterMaq

Did I misunderstand Udell's argument against WinFS?

Riding Herd — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 08:39:00 GMT

re: Jon Udell questions the value and direction of WinFS

Michael Bartlett — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 15:21:00 GMT

I've got hours of thoughts on this whole thing, so for the sanity of others I'll limit this post to just one or two.

Firstly, with regards to the Jazz Music example, free text search can be just fine if you limit the scope of the search to mp3s - or "My Music". You wouldn't then come up with any Word document containing jazz as it would be out of scope for the search. What I don't understand is how it would be any different using WinFS as the user's experience of the search is "Jazz" - so how would your (Jeremy) example be any better. Which lead me to believe that I don't perhaps understand your example because now you are talking about a developer of a movie editing package adding "smarts" relating to the iTunes package. Could you elaborate a little on your example, in particular to the users' experience and not neccessarily how easy it is to code.

My second point is a general one on WinFS and, indeed Longhorn's marketing messaging... could you please stop citing examples of pictures and music?!! I see very few examples of the benefit to corporate workgroups, especially when working with files on a mapped network drive. Is there any light you can shine on this for us (me) Jeremy?

Jon Udell's blogs turn into a cover story

Riding Herd — Tue, 20 Jul 2004 19:50:00 GMT

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Riding Herd : Jon Udell questions the value and direction of WinFS

Weddings — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 07:40:47 GMT

Jon Udell at InfoWorld is doing a series of blog entries on Longhorn. Feedster just discovered his first one, from Wednesday on the justifcation for WinFS defining a new way to manage metadata . It's a well written entry, and deserves a well thought ou