This is way nerdy stuff - significant way nerdy stuff

Apple's forthcoming Tiger operating system offers a compelling advantage. The following are Apple's words, but we concur and we think the advent of this system at this point in time is a landmark. Tiger will enable unmitigated access to meta-data for all. This access will enable the development of data-mining tools that will enable the world to mine its digital assets more effectively. If you were waiting for Apple to follow up the iPod, a product that established its presence in the entertainment industry, then this is it. This is devilishly clever! Meta-data is, succinctly stated, data about data. It provides a description about the data contained in a file such as (but not limited to) its height, width, size, creator, copyright holder, title, editor, created date, and last modification date. In practice, there is so much data that can be considered meta-data that these descriptions usually are generalized as a dictionary of descriptive attributes indexed by keys. You can think of it as the "what, when, and who" of a piece of data.

This access will enable the development of data-mining tools that will enable the world to mine its digital assets more effectively.

If you were waiting for Apple to follow up the iPod, a product that established its presence in the entertainment industry, then this is it. This is devilishly clever!

From Apple's Developer Forum: Spotlight marks a watershed in operating system history. For years people have been talking about making the file system as quick and easy to search as the web as well as using meta-data to make those searches more accurate. For years it's been all talk. Other operating systems have long promised it. Third party add-ons are starting to appear that provide it. When Tiger ships, however, it will be the first industrial strength operating system to feature a fully integrated, fast, and efficient search across all of the files on a system.

Make no mistake about it, Spotlight isn't "bolted on" to the system. It's a completely new search technology that is tightly integrated with a fundamental part of the OS: The file system. Every time a file is created, saved, moved, copied, or deleted, the file system automatically ensures that the file is properly indexed, catalogued, and ready for whatever search query might be issued-all in the background. These abilities build on the already impressive capabilities of the journaled HFS+ file system.

Not only is Spotlight available to end users, but the array of search technologies that make up Spotlight are also available to developers. This means that you'll be able to tap into these powerful search technologies to find files to display, plug-ins to load, and data to mine in your applications. No restrictions. No limits.

The technologies that power Spotlight are:

A database consisting of a high-performance meta-data store and content index that is fully integrated into the file system.

Programmatic APIs that are part of the CoreServices and Cocoa frameworks that let you query the meta-data store and content index.

...continued