Re: Looking for document and file organisation tools
On Tuesday, March 3, 2015 at 10:50:04 PM UTC+5:30, Hendrik Boom wrote:
> What free software is there in the way of organizing lots of documents?
>
> To be more precise, the ones I *need* to organize are the files on hard
> drives, though if I could include documents I have elsewhere (bookshelves
> and photocopy files) I wouldn't mind. They are text documents in a
> variety of file formats and languages, source code for current and
> obsolete systems, jpeg images, film clips, drawings, SVG files, files,
> object code, shared libraries, fragments of drafts of books, ragged
> software documentation, works in progress ...
>
> And I'm not looking for one single solution that will do everything I'd
> like. Indeed, I suspect that's impossible without building an entirely
> new OS. Which I'm not likely to find off the shelf, nor am I likely to
> be able to do it myself in the few decades I may have left in my life.
> And even if it were feasible, there's probably a lot of research to be
> done before we even know what such a thing should actually do.
>
> Of course the files are already semi-organized in directories. But I
> haven't yet managed to find a suitable collection of directory names.
> Hierarchical classification isn't ideal
Bullseye! As someone quipped: Why is google able to find things on the www
better than I am able to find in my drive?
In one word (rather two) hierarchical filesystems
Have you seen recoll http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/
> Of course the taxonomists would advise setting up a controlled vocabulary
> of tags and attaching tags to the various files. I'd end up with
> triples store or some other database describing files.
>
> But how to identify the files being tagged? A file-system pathname isn't
> enough. Files get moved, and sometimes entire directory trees full of
> files get moved from one place to another for various pragmatic reasons.
> And a hashcode isn't enough. files get edited, upgraded, recompiled,
> reformatted, converted from JIS code to UTF-8, and so forth. Images get
> cropped and colour-corrected. And under these changes they should keep
> their assigned classification tags.
>
> Now a number of file formats can accommodate metadata. And some software
> that manipulates files can preserve metadata and even allow user editing
> of the metadata. But more doesn't.
>
> Much of it could perhaps be done by auttomatic content analysis. Other
> material may require labour-intensive manual classification.
>
> No I don't expect to see any off-the-shelf solution for all of this.
>
> But does anyone have ideas as to how to accomplish even some of this?
> Even poorly?
>
> Does anyone know of relevant practical tools? Or have ideas towards
> tools that *should* exist but currently don't?
>
> I'm ready to experiment.
>
> -- hendrik
>
>
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