File System Considered Harmful
Abstract
As an intern at the IBM Almaden Research Center in 2001 I have co-designed and implemented the "Information Programming Toolkit" that aims at making information accessible using the categories, cues and relationships that people rely on when thinking about and remembering information.
The IPtk tries to overcome the limitations of the file metaphor which requires painful mapping between file names and how people remember information. Using a file system, users may for example have to translate "That paragraph about Java RMI I read last week after I read that email from Paul about lunch, maybe it was in a pdf file or email or web page" into "~/download/stuff/somepaper.tar". This is automatically done by the IPtk.
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