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The Reality of Semantic Desktops: Death To Tags, Labels and Folders
Posted on May 21st, 2008 13 commentsSo, I recently saw some more updates on the Gnome Live wiki regarding the evolution of a ‘Semantic Desktop’. I have some bad news people: Its not going to happen. Now before everyone spends 20 minutes explaining all the ways it could, let me clarify my point. It’s a largely unattainable goal, which if it ever were to complete, would be a horrible user experience. I think somewhere between RDF, FoaF, and ObjectRank we lost sight of the original goal of a Semantic Desktop. We wanted to organize, present and store data in a fashion more congruent with the human mind. The general effort behind the Semantic Web and Desktop movements was to reduce the ‘multiplier effect’ of communication. (Take for example one e-mail sent to a mailing list, the file and data is now duplicated a hundred times over, and each receiver must filer or classify the e-mail with relationship to themselves). On the scale that communication takes place over the web, this effort is still crucial, but in the desktop world, where we operate on a billionth of the scale, that problem is not nearly as pervasive. No doubt the advances made in understanding and structuring the mass hysteria of the web will benefit desktop users, but I think forcing that structure onto the desktop is not only impossible, but counter-productive.
In my opinion the options are clearly laid out before us:
1) Move the desktop into the structured realm of a million and one tags/categories/color filters/labels/folders
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2) Get rid of it all. And just know what the user wants. (Ok, not really all of it, but instead of adding more hierarchies, we add more in-place understanding)I know, its a bold statement, but somewhere between my tags, stars, labels, folders and emblems I realized that all these efforts we were making towards ease of use and understanding are just obfuscating things even further. These elaborate systems that require users to squeeze into sub-par standards like iCal exacerbate the problem even more, and ignore the efficiency of simple systems, like a pad of paper. (Yes, props to Tomboy). The problem is, many times a blunt-simple interface requires significantly more work on the programmers side (to actually understand the data entered) than a more traditional tabs-and-forms approach. I think we are demanding too much from users, how many people actually keep their address book completely updated? Or tag all their photos, or keep every document in the right folder? Even those who are vigilant eventually fall behind, and that’s because users already know what the material they are filling is, but still have to spend time explaining to the computer which items are related and where they belong. Especially for users with large sets of desktop data (Few thousand docs,e-mails,photos, and songs) the time can add up. Instead of asking users to commit even more time for data integrity and organization with more tagging systems.
The way I see it, we can count on 2 skills from a Desktop user.
1) Searching ( ThankYou Google!! Most people are quite comfortable with search phrasing!) or more accurately, knowing what they are looking for
2) To use their computer even when they aren’t looking for something (ie content generation, surfing the web, chat etc.)These are the common denominators that we should be reaching for. We shouldn’t be trying to make the user classify their relationship with each person in their address book, we should just always be there, identifying the relationship based upon their level of interaction. And on a higher level than traditional approaches have taken us. After working on the Beagle Project for some time, the incredible weight of maintaining the backends to communicate with each mail client, each rss reader and each chat client almost seems to drown out the gain from having the data in a central and unified place. I mean, each time it was just someone talking to someone else right? Why have we taken simple actions and tried to codify them, when the complexities of human behavior are so great any Psychologist would tell you its a guessing game anyways. I think we should start with the disorganized mess that is someones workday at a computer and ask for nothing else. Reverse the system, take all of our analytical energies and structure, and use it for ourselves, in the backend, and just have the users use computers.
The best example of this is the phenomenon of tagging. Basically associating like objects via keyword-phrases. The problem is tags restrict themselves, lets say I have created a blog post about web browsers, while the tags ‘html, web, mozilla, ie’ may indeed be the most accurate 4 words from my point of view, they in no way approach the whole set of meanings and connotations carried by all their synonyms, let alone the entire post. In the realm of multimedia, tags are more useful, as images and videos are harder to extract contextual value from, but there is a better way….
Lets be smart! Instead of trying to stem the tide of data to make it more manageable, we ride the wave! Data is very rarely stagnate on a machine, people send photos to friends, edit each others papers, and share music all the time, there is a wealth of information in the chat I have with a friend while he listens to the new song I sent him, we just need to grab it!
I have specifics and even a little bit of code for my next post, but until then, I want feedback, do people agree? I mean, yeah, a million and one more ways for me to catalog and store my data, but when I’m actually looking for something the tags never seem to help much. While tags and folders do help with the clutter problem, I want to propose the idea that we move completely beyond presenting the hierarchy to the user, and start determining how (from the most basic of usage data) we could better present/organize information. Is the ubiquitous search box the only UI system that fits? What about something like Dasher meets lowfat, powered by an incredible datastore, but for files?
13 responses to “The Reality of Semantic Desktops: Death To Tags, Labels and Folders”
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Rob J. Caskey May 21st, 2008 at 07:05
I’d be a happy boy if I could just get at recently used files. And I mean the files that were _really_ recently used.
Jane Smith edits a file and gives it to me on USB? I put in the device and *BAM* it should be there in a Recent Files place.
I download a file? Where did it get saved, I don’t care it’s in Recent Files!
That email attachment from this morning? Yup, there too.
Last document I wrote? Recent files.
We get a filterable Recent files places “my files, john’s files, other files, system files, etc” and I could eliminate 90% of my file-system chores.
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Isn’t the idea behind a semantic desktop to make all this metadata about various things machine understandable, rather than providing yet another way of organizing things. The goal of which being to allow the computer to make inferences based on it, i.e. just know what the user wants.
Or am I confusing it with the Semantic Web?
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I think you are going the right way. You can not expect that the user start filling all the information you need to make the Semantic Desktop thingy happen. Cause filling metadata sucks and no one that has a life will do it. So you need to start looking at what are the relations that you have now a day in the desktop (contacts in evolution, chat logs, mails, photos). But also add more logic to automatically add metadata to objects in the desktop ( i.e. algorithms for keywords generations there are some very cheap, algorithms for face detection something like http://code.google.com/soc/2007/gnome/appinfo.html?csaid=7CCBE044F1515ED3 ). I think semantic desktop should be one of the main goals for gnome 3.0, but if you think about it as something that the user needs to work on you are totally in the wrong path! Yes you can ask him to tag one face but the next ones will need to be guessed by gnome.
Just my 2 cents, hope not to have spammed a lot….
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I agree with you. But then, really, providing the user with more things to do (”power”) doesn’t mean he has to use all the stuff in excess.
I really see this as the way people use twitter for example. You can micro-blog, but you need to keep a balance (how much ‘useful/often/important/etc’)
It’s really related to the ‘hammer effect’ thingy, when you give somebody a hammer and he starts nailing everything xD
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oliver May 21st, 2008 at 11:43
Seems like a good idea to me. For example, I noticed that in F-Spot, I usually tag a set of photos with something like “Mallorca vacation 2007″ or “Christmas 2007″ or (if there was no special occasion) just “Family”.
But actually I never really look at those tags… It’s more my sense for “it _has_ to be ordered somehow or I’ll forget whether that photo was from Mallorca or from somewhere else – OMG!”…. Thinking of it, if F-Spot could just correlate some loose info (from other sources) to find that I’ve been to Mallorca during a specific time and that a certain set of photos must hence display Mallorca, that would be cool.OTOH, it’s scary to imagine that suddenly some private info that I stored in a non-public “diary” or whatever is used by some intelligent app and is then leaked onto the net…
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@oliver Exactly! I have tons of tags in f-spot, which I spend a lot of time attending too, but still, when I’m looking for a photo, I never use them… I think that some intelligent grouping based upon time, and people identified from the photos might be a cooler way…. at least I wouldn’t spend 30 minutes tagging every roll I take.
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Benedikt May 21st, 2008 at 12:55
Bravo!
That really is all I wanted to say, Kevin. It would be great if your vision became reality. -
khiraly May 21st, 2008 at 13:00
I would be more than happy if nautilus’ search functionality would work.
If Im looking for something I always use the good old boy: midnight commander’s search functionality.For example, if I search in nautilus for: *.avi
It doesnt return with all of them, just some or none.
I often looking for ‘*something*.pdf’.
So I know two things:
* the extension (the type of the document)
* part of the filenameWould be good, if the base will work before to do some exotic things.. (I could written buzzwords)
If somebody keep their filesystem clean and organize stuff cleanly, for him the tags are not helping, f-spot/picasa photo organizing is just confusing (like the internet explorer’s auto-guess folder views under windows). All these softwares are just trying to be more clever as I am, and keep always reorganizing (my already organized) stuff.
Its soo boring.
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@Benedikt Thanks!
@khiraly: Yeah, most of those issues are distro/linkage problems, there are tons of problems making sure that gtk/nautilus get built against the proper API’s. Things like that should work in Beagle through the main interface. My thought is more towards an augments ranking system to make desktop search much more accurate, and the means to know what desktop objects are important to others (ie. Path-Based browsing, not unlike how dasher works, but cooler and more awesome-er). I want to see more natural language parsing on a massive scale. Imagine not opening an application to add something to the calendar or add a contact, but simply typing a sentance like:
‘I have a meeting on Saturday with Joe’
or
‘I need to fix bug #555555 by Friday’
Google Calendar has an implementation of this within a narrow scope, but I would like to try and interact on a more natural level. In the above mentioned scenario, if I proceed to ask 3 people about bug #555555 then it has an inferred or suggested priority (overwritable). I’ll have some code to demo soonish. -
Books and Magazines Blog » Archive » Kevin Kubasik: The Reality of Semantic Desktops: Death To Tags, Labels and Folders May 21st, 2008 at 14:38
[...] Kevin Kubasik: The Reality of Semantic Desktops: Death To Tags, Labels and Folders So, I recently saw some more updates on the Gnome Live wiki regarding the evolution of a ‘Semantic Desktop’. I have some bad news people: Its not going to happen. Now before everyone spends 20 minutes explaining all the ways it could, let me clarify my point. It’s a largely unattainable goal, … [...]
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Hey. great ideas! Geoffrey Hinton recently improved upon neural networks efficiency by removing the need for labels, and we can improve user experience and efficiency by removing tags from files and deducing meaning from the content. Let’s go even further and get rid of files names. Raskin comes to mind: “Let the content be content.” He is a big supporter of search too.
So good luck! I hope I can help in any way possible.
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