"Today, applications encapsulate data. In the future, applications will be able to read and write data created with multiple applications," Muglia said. "Information opens up dramatically."
WinFS will be a significant change for application developers as well. The software is designed to give programmers more powerful tools to build applications that can fetch information from different data stores, such as email servers, databases and desktop applications, at the same time.
One of the ways that WinFS will improve searching across Windows machines is a mechanism to store related "metadata" with a given file. The metadata will provide more context and keyword information than Windows applications do today. For example, currently a person can use Windows to view when photos were taken. WinFS is being designed to allow a person to search with more specific information, such as who is in the picture.
WinFS also is designed to improve search across several applications on a corporate network. If WinFS is used as the underlying storage system in many applications, a person could search for all documents and data related to a particular topic.
The metadata will be described in "schemas," or an XML data format. These schemas will define common objects, such as documents, music files and email messages, which the operating system can find and store, Muglia said. Customers can define their own schemas for identifying stored data as well.
The need for WinFS is being driven by the explosion of data and ever-growing hard drives, according to Microsoft. The company has recognised that search, or querying, is fast becoming a more practical means of retrieving information than navigating through a hierarchy of folders and subfolders.
"With 1-terabyte hard drives in the not-too-distant future, it is starting to seem reasonable to store pretty much any piece of information you own on a PC. But if you can't organise it, what's the point?" Jeremy Mazner, a Longhorn evangelist at Microsoft, wrote in a recent blog posting.
