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Tocc, a Tool for Obsessive Compulsive Classifiers

What is it?

Have you ever had problem classifying your files? I had a lot! For example, I classified my e-books by subjects: for each subject, I have a directory. But, sometimes there are books that goes on different categories. A book about "Aspect Oriented Programming in Java" can both goes to "Programming/Java" or "Programming/Design". And worse than that, what if you want to also categories your books by author or publication?

One day, I was talking about this with one of my friends. Like me, he was always classifies his files. We shared our techniques: using management applications (which can only classifies specific type of files), using soft links (which will be corrupted if files move). Then we came to an idea: we wished there was a file system that uses tags instead of folders. Then, we could classify our files anyhow we want!

Imagine that you can tag your files with anything: tag photos by location they captured, people in the photos, techniques you used (e.g. black & white, HDR), tag books with their subject, author, size, etc. Then, finding files is as simple as running a query like "give me all files tagged photo and my-love"! You don't have to create a depth tree of directories. Instead, you have some clean and nicely classified set of tags.

That was how Tocc born...

Where to go from here?

Also see the Vision of the project.