Bringing order to chaos

Melvil Dewey was an incredibly clever bloke. With his Dewey Decimal system he single-handedly managed to bring order to libraries around the world. His system was to assign numbers to books, based on dividing all books into 10 sections, each section into 10 main classes, 100 divisions and 1,000 sections. By using decimal numbers to do this it meant that his system was purely numerical and infinitely hierarchical. It also made it a hell of a lot easier for librarians to file books, as they just had to put them back on the shelves in numerical order.

It’s a system that’s still in use in libraries across the world today. However, the system has its flaws, particularly that books can only exist in a single category. Imagine walking up to Mr. Dewey and asking him to show you all books on the subject of WWII. He could easily point you to that entire section, but he couldn’t also pull out every other book in the library that contains a fleeting reference to this subject.

It’s here that computers really triumph, with the ability to ditch a flat filing system and organise the same set of data in hundreds of different ways on the fly. To do this files are typically tagged with metadata, which is extra descriptive information. It sounds a trifle dull, but makes the whole world a lot easier.

You probably even use a system like this on a daily basis with your MP3 player. All MP3 files can have an associated ID3 tag, which stores, amongst other things, the name of the track, the album it belongs to, the artist it’s by and genre of music it belongs to. It’s this data that means your MP3 player can show you tracks organised by artist, album, genre and more. This invention totally changed the way that we deal with music and means that the boring flat file system, where MP3 files are stored in Folders on a hard disk, has no relation to the way that we access music.
A similar story can be told with image files. If you took a photo with your digital camera the image will already contain some handy information, such as the date the picture was taken on and the camera settings used to take it. You can go one step further by using software like Google’s Picasa. This free utility lets you tag images with keywords of your choice, so you can sort and find photos more easily. For example, you could tag every photo of your dog with its name; selecting that tag will show every single picture of your do no matter when or where it was taken. Again, it’s goodbye boring, flat file system and hello dynamic organisation.

This revolution isn’t just limited to the desktop and free-flow organisation is starting to appear in every product we use. I saw a company called Macrovision recently. Aside from producing the copy-protection system that makes your TV show a blue screen if you try and pirate a VHS video, the company is also a massive provider of information to third-party companies.

It’s this extended set of data that’s making it possible for some incredible products to come out. I saw a CD server product, which rips CDs to an internal hard disk. Rather than use basic MP3 information, Macrovision provides the manufacturers with access to a massive database of music information. This includes things like category (down to the ridiculous level, such as electro-jazz funk), the mood of the song, what the song is about (marriage, divorce, love, hate and so on), a review of the disc and a list of every musician that had anything to do with it. With this level of information, you can not only move around your music collection in infinite varied ways, but you can also find new music in an incredible way.

So, if you love the saxophone solo on Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street you can find out who played it (sadly, it’s not Bob Holness as legend has it, but Raphael Ravenscroft) and find out everything else he ever played on and even if he has any solo albums.

Similar intelligence is now being built into Macrovision’s EPG product that it sells to third-party manufacturers, such as Sony, for use in their TVs and hard disk recorders. Instead of a flat view of what’s on TV, you’ll soon be able to find out who’s in a show, their biography, what else they’ve been in and, more importantly, what else they’re on that week. This is incredible and shows just what computers are capable of when they’re played to their strengths.

The real question is, why can’t we do this with everything? How amazing would it be to be able to tag your office documents, so that you can quickly sort and organise them by subject, and jump directly to the one you’re after? Let’s hope Microsoft is listening and the old folder structure can be mostly set aside while we get at our data in any way we see fit.