Are there any applications that organize files in overlapping hiera...

Xyne · 2010-04-29 08:05:48

The title almost says it all

Does anyone know of any application which can be used to arrange files into hierarchies which overlap in such a way that a file may rightfully belong in multiple branches? Two examples:

Example 1: You have a collection of ebooks which you would like to organize into subjects. Some are clean-cut and fall nicely into a single category, which works well for standard directory hierarchies (e.g. science/mathematics). Some books span multiple categories (e.g. mathematics, programming, cryptography) and thus do not fit in a single directory (e.g. science/cryptography). You would like to be able to list all books in each category and see this book show up in mathematics, programming and cryptography.

Example 2: You have a digital music library that you would like to categorize in different ways (genre, artist, etc). When deciding on genres, some songs|albums are mixtures of several genres...

Is there anything that can handle this type of organization. I suppose that I'm looking for a generic tagging tool that facilitates searches and file operations. Ideally it would present a filesystem interface. I actually have a few ideas of how to implement something (one of which involves FUSE) but I think it would take more time than it's currently worth to me.

I've seen some applications to organize articles but they seemed too specific and inflexible.

Last edited by Xyne (2010-04-30 02:41:35)

thisoldman · 2010-04-29 08:20:49

Something like oyepa? http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~marriaga/software/oyepa/

Xyne · 2010-04-30 02:17:22

Thanks, thisoldman. That's not exactly what I'm looking for but the basic idea is the same.

mikesd · 2010-04-30 06:08:45

An easy way, though perhaps not scalable, would be a couple of bash functions (tag, untag) that made use of hard/soft links. Each tag will be a separate directory that contained links to files in a master directory containing the actual files.

keenerd · 2010-04-30 13:05:43

And now Oyepa is in the AUR.

While a FUSE (or libixp) based design would be pretty neat, you might be able to get away with a "bash database". Not a collection of symlinks, but just a text file with filepaths and tags, and a few lines of awk for walking/editing the list. Downside, you'd need to prefix everything with a meta command and it would be using stdio instead of files.

But a filesystem interface would be pretty sweet. Mainly because I have not yet gotten one to work properly, and your code has always been well written and very borrowable.

Dieter@be · 2010-04-30 15:26:31

what a bunch of overcomplications. just use links. hard or soft.

RAA · 2010-04-30 16:04:30

Currently i'm devoloping such a filesystem using FUSE. It's nice but it's very "beta" It uses tags instead of directories ... a lot better than using thousands of sym- or hardlinks.

If you want to test it, contact me

RAA

Dieter@be · 2010-04-30 16:12:25

This makes me wonder if there are filesystems that have "metadata features" to support using hardlinks this way. (ie querying stuff like "give me all hardlinks to this file)

sctincman · 2010-04-30 16:34:56

This actually is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for to organize all my research papers. So far I've been using zim (for the non-linear hierarchal back-linkable organization, and attaching files as needed) but not the smoothest workflow. What I do like about it is that zim uses plain text files and directories to store the pages/attachments, so you can use simple command line tools to work through the data too.

I had started hacking the skeleton of a helper plugin to do most of this work for me, but I like the idea of hard/soft-links much more. However, how easy would it be to find what links to a file, and how well do hard/soft links translate for commands like rsync? I think I've got some more shell-fu to look into

edit: seems a tandem "ls -li file" to get # links and inode number, then "find path -xdev -inum inode#" will do the job for finding hard links to a file

and -H option to rsync will preserve hardlinks

Last edited by sctincman (2010-04-30 16:45:18)

thisoldman · 2010-04-30 22:38:49

I haven't tried it yet, but my Googling "linux file tagging" brought up pathtags 0.9.1. http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pathtags/0.9.1

mikesd · 2010-05-01 00:24:15

Another option might be Extended file attributes

ngoonee · 2010-05-01 03:29:06

@sctincman, I use Zotero (firefox extension) for research papers, its really quite good, you have folders and tagging.

thisoldman · 2010-05-02 03:43:33

@Xyne, I've done a lot of searching and learned a bit about semantic file systems on the way. I think 'tagsistant' in AUR may be close to what you would want. I'm going to give it a workout.

The tagsistant home is http://www.tagsistant.net/ . The website is a little odd to navigate – I missed a few pages in the 'Documents' section the first time through. The 'README' in the source files is the only other usage guide; there are no man pages.

Edit: After trying tagsistant, I decided it's just another layer of complexity I don't need. I'll keep my files in their labyrinthine but ordered directories and just try to be better with descriptive names.

Last edited by thisoldman (2010-05-02 11:23:46)

rasat · 2010-05-02 07:25:51

Many times I have also been looking for a searchable file system. In an office where many persons are using a common file system or when having hundreds of files trying to create tags, files belonging to multiple categories, will often get confusing in long run.

People remember the content therefor searching for particular word(s) in a document. In 90's Windows had an excellent search file system like ZY Index e.g. search for "education w/15 child" with the result finding all documents containing the words "education" and "child" which is within 15 words. In Linux I have not find such well defined search engine, though, I am quite impressed with the search system openKM is using for the Document Management System (DMS). I am still searching.
http://www.openkm.com/

rwd · 2010-05-02 11:46:34

You probably know djmount, it kinda does what you want, presenting a upnp media library via fuse. Some of the desktop search tools and document managent systems look usable too, even more so if you need version tracking, editing by multiple users etc. all of which filesystems don't really do. It does strike me as inefficient though that every media/p2p/.app keeps its own non portable library of files, eating up CPU cycles while indexing. It would be nice to have one document management system that is used by every app, and can be mounted as well.

Last edited by rwd (2010-05-02 12:36:13)

rasat · 2010-05-02 14:42:17

Thanks for the link!
Recoll search system looks promising.

Arch Linux

#1 2010-04-29 08:05:48

Are there any applications that organize files in overlapping hiera...

#2 2010-04-29 08:20:49

Re: Are there any applications that organize files in overlapping hiera...

#3 2010-04-30 02:17:22

Re: Are there any applications that organize files in overlapping hiera...

#4 2010-04-30 06:08:45

Re: Are there any applications that organize files in overlapping hiera...

#5 2010-04-30 13:05:43

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#6 2010-04-30 15:26:31

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#7 2010-04-30 16:04:30

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#8 2010-04-30 16:12:25

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#9 2010-04-30 16:34:56

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#10 2010-04-30 22:38:49

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#11 2010-05-01 00:24:15

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#12 2010-05-01 03:29:06

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