Scoble on Search Engines and WinFS

I just read an interesting interview by Andy Beal of Robert Scoble in which Scoble discusses the future of search engines and Longhorns new WinFS file system. A main highlight for me was his discussion of photos, metadata and making photos more searchable. “With WinFS searching and metadata will be part of the operating system. … It lets you (and developers of apps you’ll use) add metadata to your files.” Now what I’m trying to figure out is what standards are being used for this metadata storage. From my research with photo metadata there are a lot of different standards out there specific to photos. I thought the most promising was XMP because it is being pushed by Adobe and is or will soon be supported by all of it’s applications including Photoshop and Photoshop Album. It is also supported by other apps including PixVue and PhotoGizmo. And XMP was designed not just for photos, but for all types of files. However, after a couple of google searches, it seems like Microsoft is creating there own XML metadata schemas. Sure they may have an api that allows other apps to read/write metadata, but I wonder what why another new standard is needed. As with Scoble’s radical idea with Google and Microsoft, I’d like to see Microsoft and Adobe work together on file metadata. It would be nice for both consumers and developers to be able to move files between systems and apps, without the need to re-enter data, or implement multiple metadata standards.