[Sigia-l] Searchable File Names

[Andrew McNaughton]

On Fri, 13 Sep 2002, Charles Hanson wrote:

> I wonder whether anyone on the list has had success with developing a
> strategy to create unique filenames that are "meaningful" enough to be
> searched for by administrative users (editors) within a content
> production environment.  For the most part, the files in question are
> articles or the constituent elements of them (images, flash files,
> textual elements and so on).
>
> That is, the filename itself could contain some indication of:
>
> Source/Creator
> Title
> Date Published
>
> Users would search for some string in the filename.
>
> Advice or suggestions?  Many thanks.

There are a *lot* of competing aspects of the files content, role, etc
that might be considered here.  Probably your actual file names will be
based on some of these.  My gut reaction though is that over-specifying
how file names are to be constructed is going to be a bad idea in most
cases.  If you need detailed searchability, you need metadata, and the
filename just isn't really big enough to store that metadata.

Andrew