The reason hierarchical structures are used in file systems is because they are a pretty intuitive and, most importantly, <i>generic</i> way of classifying and storing information.  For the most part, just about any file you have on your computer can be stuffed into some sort of folder structure.<p>Specialized files like music, movies and images are a solved problem.  iTunes and other software do a great job at organizing this information and making it easy to use.  There&#x27;s also software like Quicken for dealing with the other common mountain of data people have.<p>What <i>might</i> be useful is a piece of software that is capable of extracting and managing metadata automatically.  Think of a tool like iTunes that you feed it a collection of files and it uses some form of ML to extract and create a database build logical ontologies for this data.  The big problem with this kind of tool is finding a large, complex dataset that an individual has, but that has not been organized by a specialized piece of software.  I doubt these exists in numbers significant enough to justify creating a project.<p>tl;dr: Directory structures are low-effort, generic, and discoverable ways of dealing with files that are not managed by other applications.  It will be hard to improve on them without sacrificing one of those three attributes.