WinFS is less of a filesystem , and more of a relationship builder.WinFS includes a relational database for storage of information, and allows any type of information to be stored in it, provided there is a well defined schema for the type. Individual data items could then be related together by relationships, which are either inferred by the system based on certain attributes or explicitly stated by the user. As the data has a well defined schema, any application can reuse the data; and using the relationships, related data can be effectively organized as well as retrieved. Because the system knows the structure and intent of the information, it can be used to make complex queries that enable advanced searching through the data and aggregating various data items by exploiting the relationships between them.
Many filesystems
found on common operating systems, including the NTFS filesystem which is used in modern versions of Microsoft Windows, store files and other objects only as a stream of bytes, and have little or no information about the data stored in the files. Such file systems also provide only a single way of organizing the files, namely via directories and file names.
Because a file system has no knowledge about the data it stores, applications tend to use their own, often proprietary, file formats. This hampers sharing of data between multiple applications. It becomes difficult to create an application which processes information from multiple file types, because the programmers have to understand the structure and semantics of all the files.
WinFS natively recognizes different types of data, such as picture, e-mail, document, audio, video, calendar, contact, among others; rather than just bytestreams as with file systems. Data stored and managed by the system are instances of the data type recognized by the WinFS runtime. The data is structured by means of properties. For example, an instance of a résumé type will surface the data by exposing certain properties like Name, Educational Qualification, Experience, among others. Each of the properties may be of simple types like strings, integers, or dates or complex types like contacts. Different data types expose different properties. Besides that, WinFS also allows different data instances to be related together, such as a document and a contact can be related by an Authored By relationship. Relationships are also exposed as properties; for example if a document is related to a contact by a Created By relationship, then the document will have a Created By property. When it is accessed, the relationship is traversed and the related data returned.By following the relations, all related data can be reached.
Because of it's good storage system Microsoft should resume it's work on WinFS.
Because a file system has no knowledge about the data it stores, applications tend to use their own, often proprietary, file formats. This hampers sharing of data between multiple applications. It becomes difficult to create an application which processes information from multiple file types, because the programmers have to understand the structure and semantics of all the files.
WinFS natively recognizes different types of data, such as picture, e-mail, document, audio, video, calendar, contact, among others; rather than just bytestreams as with file systems. Data stored and managed by the system are instances of the data type recognized by the WinFS runtime. The data is structured by means of properties. For example, an instance of a résumé type will surface the data by exposing certain properties like Name, Educational Qualification, Experience, among others. Each of the properties may be of simple types like strings, integers, or dates or complex types like contacts. Different data types expose different properties. Besides that, WinFS also allows different data instances to be related together, such as a document and a contact can be related by an Authored By relationship. Relationships are also exposed as properties; for example if a document is related to a contact by a Created By relationship, then the document will have a Created By property. When it is accessed, the relationship is traversed and the related data returned.By following the relations, all related data can be reached.
Because of it's good storage system Microsoft should resume it's work on WinFS.
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