Tagsistant is a semantic filesystem.

So, the question becomes: what is a semantic file system? It's a new way to organize files on disk, using tags in place of directories. Let's see the difference.

In a traditional filesystem, files are organized using directories. As you know, a directory is basically a container for files and other directories, which are usually called subdirectories. Basically, a file can be found in one or more directories, using features like links. This seems to be quite a rational approach to file storage, and from a computer perspective it is indeed. But from the human point of view?

The main drawback of traditional filesystems surfaces later, when you need to access your files. You must remember where you placed what. Otherwise you have to search through the filesysem. And what is worse, you can't ask the computer to do the search for you. In fact, you can't look for something that is located here and there, like in the music directory and in the concert directory and in the London directory at the same time. It's all up to you.

But what is really painful is looking for a file, let say a photo of an old friend, which your camera called PIC_83672.jpg and you left in a directory called, well, "stuff". You'll never find it.

That's where Tagsistant enters.

In Tagsistant each directory is a tag, like a sticker you place on things to mark them. Using tags, Tagsistant can answer to requests like: give me all the photos taken in London last year! All you have to do is just list the content of london/AND/2010/AND/photo/.

And what about the order? Another good news! You don't even need to remember it, because the same result can be reached by london/AND/photo/AND/2010/ or photo/AND/2010/AND/london/.

Tagsistant can do even more, by reasoning on relationships between tags. If you tell Tagsistant that "europe includes london" (thus creating a relationship between "london" and "europe"), you'll find your London photos inside the "europe" directory even if you didn't put them there. Tagsistant understands two relationships: "includes", like in the "europe includes london" example, and "is equivalent", like in "photo is equivalent to photographs".

Last but not least, Tagsistant features a plugin mechanism to extend its abilities in file tagging. Each file which is tagged by the user can be also examined by a stack of plugins which automagically extract tags from file contents. So far, no plugin is available, but the architecture is here and the plugins are coming.

Tagsistant is free software provided to you under the GPL license. You can download it and use it, and all you "pay" is to spread the news and promote it, if you find it useful.

Now you can: download it - see the demo - register on the site