Storage systems such as WinFS (Microsoft Windows® Future Storage or Microsoft Windows® File System), for example, allow different kinds of data to be identified by metadata and uses it to set up relationships among data, thereby giving a semantic structure to the data. These relationships can then be used by a relational database to enable searching and dynamic aggregation of the data, allowing the data to be presented in a variety of ways. WinFS includes a relational database engine, derived from the Microsoft® SQL Server 2005 (SQL) database platform, to facilitate this.
However, to allow applications to search and categorize data in such storage systems without knowledge of the structure of the defined types of the different kinds of data in the system, there is a need for a system that provides applications the ability to just operate on a single set of search properties rather than operating on the individual types. Also, there is a need for independent software vendors (ISVs) for such file systems to be able to pick the metadata/search properties for their types without compromising their item schema design.
Thus, needed are processes and a system that addresses the shortcomings of the prior art.