WinFS natively recognizes different types of data, such as
picture,
e-mail,
document,
audio,
video,
calendar,
contact, rather than just leaving them as raw unanalyzed bytestreams (as most file systems do). Data stored and managed by the system are instances of the data type recognized by the WinFS runtime. The data are structured by means of properties. For example, an instance of a
résumé type will surface the data by exposing properties, such as
Name,
Educational Qualification,
Experience. Each property may be a simple type (
strings,
integers,
dates) or complex types (
contacts).
[8][10] Different data types expose different properties. Besides that, WinFS also allows different data instances to be related together; such as a document and a contact can be related by an
Authored By relationship.
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