Time to say farewell to ‘Files-in-Folders’?
Peter
Bubestinger-Steindl
(Peter@ArkThis.com)2024-09
What’s wrong with how things are?
We’ve gotten used to a Digital Playmobil world.
Generic handling of “Digital Meta/Data”?
No more files and folders?!
“There is no spoon.”
- There are no files.
- There are no folders.
- Just blocks of “data” on a storage.
- And hopefully enough metadata to index and find them…
- And enough virtual space to be saved.
Think “Browser Bookmarks”
- A bookmark is “a link with metadata”.
- Imagine a bookmark manager for files.
Now just “save” it.
Did you need to:
- Give it a filename?
- Select a folder?
- Add tags?
Where’s the catch?
- Do you have enough “space” to save it?
- Do you have permission to do so?
- Does your application give you means to do so?
- Do you know enough about it - so you can find it later?
- …
Annotation & Context:
- Timestamp of creation is saved by default.
- It has a “title” information.
- It has a “link” information.
Imagine this being your new “LEGO” piece of data/information.
What if we want more?
- More data fields (key/value)?
- Relationships?
- Got a database?
- Got a spreadsheet?
- Got a format+tool to ‘embed’ it?
- Got a “schema”?
- Got migration/import/export plans & resources?
Want more than 8 characters?
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21st Century Computing
- simply “save” your data?
- simply “tag/annotate” your data sufficiently to find/use it later?
- right-click-edit-metadata on any data-object in any format, at any time?
- keep meta+data reliably together?
- have versioning, multi-tiering, geo-distribution, network-scaling, failover handling, etc. all included by default?
Sounds like: The Cloud?!
The tech-stack designed and used for “Big Data” was to overcome existing files-in-folders limitations.
- Since the early 2000s.
- A lot has happened since then.
GLAM data /is/ Big Data now.
- Because our “normal” now was their “big” in 2003.
- Data is handled very differently, but noone told us…
- We’re all dealing with growing numbers of “Related Data Objects”.
- And mixed “collections”.
- On mixed devices/environments.
From Playmobil to LEGO.
Now add…
- Arbitrary key/value fields.
- Links between Objects (Relationships).
- UIs to deal with these basic building blocks.
Big Data “features”
Collection handling?
- Ingest?
- Access?
- Merging?
Memory Institutions
- Need digital storage (memory)
- Generic “big data” stack scales from small-to-global
- Allows to become blueprint for a memory-network.
- Could serve the public with better-than-cloud services.
And all of this…
- faster
- easier
- cheaper
- with less-updates/migrations necessary
Than how we do it today.