tagstore is a research software tool developed from the Institute for Software Technology of Graz University of Technology.

The main purpose of tagstore is the refinement of a better method to manage files and folders on the local hard disk drive. Therefore tagstore is no commercial product. It is made public available under the open source license GPL v3.

Basic idea

With tagstore the user does not use the usual method of filing data in a hierarchy of folders as the only possible method. In a tagstore files and folders are being tagged by the user. Using those tags tagstore automatically generates navigation hierarchies called TagTrees. Within those TagTrees the user is able to navigate using his or her preferred software tools like file browsers, "file save..." or "file open..." dialogs.

There is a poster which illustrates basic elements of tagstore:

Use case

Using an example the concept is easy to understand: you've got a hierarchy of files related to people and another one related to your projects. And now you want to file "Bob's ideas about MyProject.txt". Within those classic hierarchies of folders the directories "People/Bob" and "Projects/MyProject" are both reasonable target folders. Without tagstore you have to decide for only one folder.

With tagstore you don't have to find one specific destination folder within the hierarchy. You just use the standard tagstore storage folder called "storage" to store files to. Then you are being asked to tag your file. You choose the tags "Bob" and "MyProject". From now on you can find the file at five locations: "Storage/", "Navigation/Bob/", "Navigation/MyProject/", "Bob/", and "Bob/MyProject/".

Advantages

While storing files you do not have to select or browse to a certain folder deep in your hierarchy. Instead, you can choose relevant tags associated to your file. Soon you're going to realize that this is a major step forward for your user experience.

Due to the automatically generated TagTrees tagstore enables you to navigate to files (file browsers, "file open..." dialogs or similar) very intuitive using associations. You do not have to remember exact browsing paths to the desired data files. Within the TagTrees you will find your tags as folders. The deeper you navigate into the TagTrees the more specific your search gets to the associations related to the desired data.

There are no dead links within TagTrees: tagstore handles all links so that they are always pointing to the data you are looking for.

The internal structure of tagstore is not using complex things like data bases. Transparency is kept at any time so that you are confident that your data is save. Working with tagstore will put the fun back in file navigation!

Tag recommendations

The tagging process has to be as simple and fast as possible. Therefore tagstore automatically offers you tag recommendations. If you spot a tag within the recommendations, just click on it to add it to your tagline.

If you already used a specific tag before, tagstore is able to offer you the whole tag after typing the first few characters of it. This speeds up typing a lot!

Datestamps

A lot of users prefer accessing informations related to their date processed. Not only because of this reason users are using datestamps to file information. tagstore offers you the cool feature of automatically proposed tags of the current day in ISO format (2024-04-18 or 2024-04).

Expiry dates

tagstore can help you avoiding the file clutter that is no longer necessary: you can define an optional expiry date when storing information. Let's say you are downloading the map of Paris Metro for you next trip to Paris. With an expiry date related to that file you make sure that the Metro map will automatically be moved to a trash folder after your trip to Paris. Using this feature tagstore helps you keeping your data clean. Nice spring-cleaner feature.

Compatibility

Because of its development techniques tagstore is fully compatible to Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and all of your software products you are currently using. You can stick to your favourite file browser, desktop search engine, or your backup system.

Long-time target

When the method of tagstore is proven to be a working alternative to the hierarchy of folders future operating systems and file systems should adopt the featureset of tagstore to enable all users great experience for handling their files and folders.

If you are interested in using tagstore go and try it out on your own!