Questions about Longhorn
Well the title should be indeed Questions about WinFS. This is the subject Jon Udell focus on in a series of articles.
Some interesting thoughts there on Search strategies:
The first strategy envisions a plurality of schemas arising from the grassroots. You won't often hear support for this strategy from Microsoft, but I heard it last fall at the Enterprise Architect Summit from Jean Paoli, who appeared (with Sun's Jon Bosak) on my panel Schemas in the wild.
The second strategy envisions a canonical set of schemas woven tightly into Longhorn. Years from now it'll ship. Years later, it'll reach critical mass, developers will have mastered its APIs, and schema-aware Windows apps could start to make a "semantic" way of organizing and finding information real for lots of people.
Why wait? Microsoft is telling us to disregard the grassroots Office XML strategy, which is here now and doesn't lock us in, in favor of the ivory-platform WinFS strategy, which is years away and does lock us in. If a compelling argument can be made for the second approach, I haven't seen it yet.
The basic thing also is that we forget the user somewhere. We are going to rely on the user to organize his data. I surely missed something here, but I believe that with all the technologies we have now, Microsoft should come with a better way to automatically do the job for us.
I agree with Jon Udell that WinFS sounds like a proprietary approach, and you can do the same already now.
It seems that Google going to show us again how to search data at light speed.
Questions on Longhorn by Jon Udell