TreeTags

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File systems are an integral part of operating systems in that they are responsible for storing and organising files and then retrieving those when needed. Because of the high capacity of modern storage devices and the increasing number of files stored, the traditional file system model is no longer be able to meet modern users' needs in terms of storing and retrieving files based on metadata. File systems need an enhanced way of organizing and accessing data in order for users to efficiently manage their ever growing collections of data. This paper aims to make a modest change to the traditional Hierarchical File System in order to improve the organisation of files, the retrieval of files through built-in support for querying, and support for file system-level operations that do bulk metadata updates. We do this by bringing the widely-used concept of tags to a hierarchy of file collections. We introduce the TreeTags model through a sequence of modest changes to the Hierarchical File system. These changes are: using (multiple) tags instead of names, collections instead of directories, and exposing a query language at the level of the API. We evaluate the expressive power of the resulting model, show that it resolves the problems inherent to traditional file systems, and compare our solution to those proposed by others.