All software that uses database technology makes two simple demands of its users: First, the user must define the form of the data in advance; and second, the user must then conform to that definition. Now I will tell you two true facts about human users of software: First, they never know what they are going to want in advance; and second, if they did, they would change their mind.
The design of today's operating systems dates from a time when computers were much less powerful than today. Consequently, page attributes are few, fixed, and uniform over the set of all pages (typically: name, location, date, size, and type). To make things simple for the operating system, pages are taken to be black boxes, users as sources of random commands, and the desktop as a tree. Users are therefore forced to label each black box and place that black box in a fixed location in a strict (and effectively linear) hierarchy.
Instead, the system should try to relieve the user of some of that burden by:
To accomplish these aims the system must analyze and store much more information about its pages, its user, and its desktop than operating systems do today.Analyzing pages so that the system as well as the user has some idea of the many attributes of the pages, and so some idea of the relative similarity of different pages.
| Page Attributes |
| Evaluating Pages |
| Linking Pages |
| A Detective Story |
