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WinFS

WinFS (short for Windows Future Storage) was the code name for a canceled data storage and management system project based on relational databases, developed by Microsoft and first demonstrated in 2003. It was intended as an advanced storage subsystem for the Microsoft Windows operating system, designed for persistence and management of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data.

WinFS includes a relational database for storage of information, and allows any type of information to be stored in it, provided there is a well defined schema for the type. Individual data items could then be related together by relationships, which are either inferred by the system based on certain attributes or explicitly stated by the user. As the data has a well defined schema, any application can reuse the data; and using the relationships, related data can be effectively organized as well as retrieved. Because the system knows the structure and intent of the information, it can be used to make complex queries that enable advanced searching through the data and aggregating various data items by exploiting the relationships between them.

While WinFS and its shared type schema make it possible for an application to recognize the different data types, the application still has to be coded to render the different data types. Consequently, it would not allow development of a single application that can view or edit all data types; rather, what WinFS enables applications to do is understand the structure of all data and extract the information that they can use further. When WinFS was introduced at the 2003 Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft also released a video presentation, named IWish, showing mockup interfaces that showed how applications would expose interfaces that take advantage of a unified type system. The concepts shown in the video ranged from applications using the relationships of items to dynamically offer filtering options to applications grouping multiple related data types and rendering them in a unified presentation.

WinFS was billed as one of the pillars of the "Longhorn" wave of technologies, and would ship as part of the next version of Windows. It was subsequently decided that WinFS would ship after the release of Windows Vista, but those plans were shelved in June 2006, with some of its component technologies being integrated into ADO.NET and Microsoft SQL Server.

Motivation
Many filesystems found on common operating systems, including the NTFS filesystem which is used in modern versions of Microsoft Windows, store files and other objects only as a stream of bytes, and have little or no information about the data stored in the files. Such file systems also provide only a single way of organizing the files, namely via directories and file names.

Because a file system has no knowledge about the data it stores, applications tend to use their own, often proprietary, file formats. This hampers sharing of data between multiple applications. It becomes difficult to create an application which processes information from multiple file types, because the programmers have to understand the structure and semantics of all the files. Using common file formats is a workaround to this problem but not a universal solution; there is no guarantee that all applications will use the format. Data with standardized schema, such as XML documents and relational data fare better, as they have a standardized structure and run-time requirements.

Also, a traditional file system can retrieve and search data based only on the filename, because the only knowledge it has about the data is the name of the files that store the data. A better solution is to tag files with attributes that describe them. Attributes are metadata about the files such as the type of file (such as document, picture, music, creator, etc.). This allows files to be searched for by their attributes, in ways not possible using a folder hierarchy, such as finding "pictures which have person X". The attributes can be recognizable by either the file system natively, or via some extension. Desktop search applications take this concept a step further. They extract data, including attributes, from files and index it. To extract the data, they use a filter for each file format. This allows for searching based on both the file's attributes and the data in it.

However, this still does not help in managing related data, as disparate items do not have any relationships defined. For example, it is impossible to search for "the phone numbers of all persons who live in Acapulco and each have more than 100 appearances in my photo collection and from whom I have had e-mail within the last month". Such a search could not be done unless it is based on a data model which has both the semantics as well as relationships of data defined. WinFS aims to provide such a data model and the runtime infrastructure that can be used to store the data, as well as the relationships between data items according to the data model, doing so at a satisfactory level of performance.

Overview
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). 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. Relationships are also exposed as properties; for example if a document is related to a contact by a Created By relationship, then the document will have a Created By property. When it is accessed, the relationship is traversed and the related data returned. By following the relations, all related data can be reached. WinFS promotes sharing of data between applications by making the data types accessible to all applications, along with their schemas. When an application wants to use a WinFS type, it can use the schema to find the data structure and can use the information. So, an application has access to all data on the system even though the developer did not have to write parsers to recognize the different data formats. It can also use relationships and related data to create dynamic filters to present the information the application deals with. The WinFS API further abstracts the task of accessing data. All WinFS types are exposed as .NET objects with the properties of the object directly mapping to the properties of the data type. Also, by letting different applications that deal with the same data share the same WinFS data instance rather than storing the same data in different files, the hassles of synchronizing the different stores when the data change are removed. Thus WinFS can reduce redundancies.

Access to all the data in the system allows complex searches for data across all the data items managed by WinFS. In the example used above ("the phone numbers of all persons who live in Acapulco and each have more than 100 appearances in my photo collection and with whom I have had e-mail within last month"), WinFS can traverse the subject relationship of all the photos to find the contact items. Similarly, it can filter all emails in last month and access the communicated with relation to reach the contacts. The common contacts can then be figured out from the two sets of results and their phone number retrieved by accessing the suitable property of the contact items.

In addition to fully schematized data (like XML and relational data), WinFS supports semi-structured data (such as images, which have an unstructured bitstream plus structured metadata) as well as unstructured data (such as files) as well. It stores the unstructured components as files while storing the structured metadata in the structured store. Internally, WinFS uses a relational database to manage data. It does not limit the data to belonging to any particular data model. The WinFS runtime maps the schema to a relational modality, by defining the tables it will store the types in and the primary keys and foreign keys that would be required to represent the relationships. WinFS includes mappings for object and XML schemas by default. Mappings for other schemas must be specified. Object schemas are specified in XML; WinFS generates code to surface the schemas as .NET classes. ADO.NET can be used to directly specify the relational schema, though a mapping to the object schema must be provided to surface it as classes. Relationship traversals are performed as joins on these tables. WinFS also automatically creates indexes on these tables, to enable fast access to the information. Indexing speeds up joins significantly, and traversing relationships to retrieve related data is performed very fast. Indexes are also used during information search; searching and querying use the indexes to quickly complete the operations, much like desktop search systems.

Development
The development of WinFS is an extension to a feature that was initially planned in the early 1990s. Dubbed Object File System, it was supposed to be included as part of Cairo. OFS was supposed to have powerful data aggregation features, but the Cairo project was shelved, and with it OFS. However, later during the development of COM, a storage system, called Storage+, based on then-upcoming SQL Server 8.0, was planned, which was slated to offer similar aggregation features. This, too, never materialized, and a similar technology, Relational File System (RFS), was conceived to be launched with SQL Server 2000. However, SQL Server 2000 ended up being a minor upgrade to SQL Server 7.0 and RFS was not implemented.

The concept was not scrapped, and served as the base for WinFS. WinFS was initially planned for inclusion in Windows Vista, and build 4051 of Windows Vista, then called by its codename "Longhorn", given to developers at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in 2003, included WinFS, but it suffered from significant performance issues. In August 2004, Microsoft announced that WinFS would not ship with Windows Vista; it would instead be available as a downloadable update after Vista's release.

On August 29, 2005, Microsoft quietly made Beta 1 of WinFS available to MSDN subscribers. It worked on Windows XP, and required the .NET Framework to run. The WinFS API was included in the System.Storage namespace. The beta was refreshed on December 1, 2005 to be compatible with version 2.0 of the .NET Framework. WinFS Beta 2 was planned for some time later in 2006, and was supposed to include integration with Windows Desktop Search, so that search results include results from both regular files and WinFS stores, as well as allow access of WinFS data using ADO.NET.

On June 23, 2006, the WinFS team at Microsoft announced that WinFS would no longer be delivered as a separate product, and some components would be brought under the umbrella of other technologies. Many of the principle features Microsoft intended to provide with WinFS included a pane for metadata property editing, breadcrumb-based property navigation, filtering or stacking items over properties, incremental search, and saved searches; these features were incorporated in Windows Vista. Query composition, a feature of WinFS that allowed users to perform additional searches that reuse the results of a previous query, was later incorporated in Windows Vista.

Examples of uses of the technology are the object-relational mapping components into ADO.NET Entity Framework; support for unstructured data, adminless mode of operation, support for file system objects via the  data type, and hierarchical data  in SQL Server 2008, then codenamed Katmai, as well as integration with Win32 APIs and Windows Shell and support for traversal of hierarchies by traversing relationships into later releases of Microsoft SQL Server; and the synchronization components into Microsoft Sync Framework.

In 2013 Bill Gates cited WinFS as his greatest disappointment at Microsoft and that the idea of WinFS was ahead of its time, which will re-emerge.

Architecture

WinFS uses a relational engine, which derives from SQL Server 2005, to provide the data-relations mechanism. WinFS stores are simply SQL Server database (.MDF) files with the FILESTREAM attribute set. These files are stored in the access-restricted folder named "System Volume Information" (placed in the volume root), in folders under the folder "WinFS" with names of GUIDs of these stores.

At the bottom of the WinFS stack lies WinFS Core, which interacts with the filesystem and provides file-access and -addressing capabilities. The relational engine leverages the WinFS core services to present a structured store and other services such as locking, which the WinFS runtime uses to implement the functionality. The WinFS runtime exposes services such as Synchronization and Rules that can be used to synchronize WinFS stores or perform certain actions on the occurrence of certain events.

WinFS runs as a service that runs three processes:

 * 1) WinFS.exe, which hosts relational datastore
 * 2) WinFSSearch.exe, which hosts the indexing and querying engine
 * 3) WinFPM.exe (WinFS File Promotion Manager), which interfaces with the underlying file-system

It allows programmatic access to its features via a set of .NET Framework APIs. These enable applications to define custom-made data types, define relationships among data, store and retrieve information, and allow advanced searches. The applications can then aggregate the data and present the aggregated data to the user.

Data store
WinFS stores data in relational stores, which are exposed as virtual locations called stores. A WinFS store is a common repository where any application can store data along with its metadata, relationships and schema. WinFS runtime can apply certain relationships itself; for example, if the values of the subject property of a picture and the name property of a contact are same, then WinFS can relate the contact with the picture. Relations can also be specified by other applications or the user.

WinFS provides unified storage, but stops short of defining the format that is to be stored in the data stores. Instead it supports writing data in application-specific formats. But applications must provide a schema that defines how the file format should be interpreted. For example, a schema could be added to allow WinFS to understand how to read and thus be able to search and analyze, (say) a PDF file. By using the schema, any application can read data from any other application, and this also allows different applications to write in each other's format by sharing the schema.

Multiple WinFS stores can be created on a single machine. This allows different classes of data to be kept segregated; for example, official documents and personal documents can be kept in different stores. WinFS, by default, provides only one store, named "DefaultStore". WinFS stores are exposed as shell objects, akin to Virtual folders, which dynamically generate a list of all items present in the store and present them in a folder view. The shell object also allows searching information in the datastore.

A data unit that has to be stored in a WinFS store is called a WinFS Item. A WinFS item, along with the core data item, also contains information on how the data item is related to other data. This Relationship is stored in terms of logical links. Links specify which other data items the current item is related with. Put in other words, links specify the relationship of the data with other data items. Links are physically stored using a link identifier, which specifies the name and intent of the relationship, such as type of or consists of. The link identifier is stored as an attribute of the data item. All the objects that have the same link ID are considered to be related. An XML schema, defining the structure of the data items that will be stored in WinFS, must be supplied to the WinFS runtime beforehand. In Beta 1 of WinFS, the schema assembly had to be added to the GAC before it could be used.

Data model
WinFS models data using the data items, along with their relationships, extensions and rules governing its usage. WinFS needs to understand the type and structure of the data items, so that the information stored in the data item can be made available to any application that requests it. This is done by the use of schemas. For every type of data item that is to be stored in WinFS, a corresponding schema needs to be provided to define the type, structure and associations of the data. These schemas are defined using XML.

Predefined WinFS schemas include schemas for documents, e-mail, appointments, tasks, media, audio, video, and also includes system schemas that include configuration, programs, and other system-related data. Custom schemas can be defined on a per-application basis, in situations where an application wants to store its data in WinFS, but not share the structure of that data with other applications, or they can be made available across the system.

Type system

The most important difference between a file system and WinFS is that WinFS knows the type of each data item that it stores. And the type specifies the properties of the data item. The WinFS type system is closely associated with the .NET framework's concept of classes and inheritance. A new type can be created by extending and nesting any predefined types.

WinFS provides four predefined base types – Items, Relationships, ScalarTypes and NestedTypes. An Item is the fundamental data object which can be stored, and a Relationship is the relation or link between two data items. Since all WinFS items must have a type, the type of item stored defines its properties. The properties of an Item may be a ScalarType, which defines the smallest unit of information a property can have, or a NestedType, which is a collection of more than one ScalarTypes and/or NestedTypes. All WinFS types are made available as .NET CLR classes.

Any object represented as a data unit, such as contact, image, video, document etc., can be stored in a WinFS store as a specialization of the Item type. By default, WinFS provides Item types for Files, Contact, Documents, Pictures, Audio, Video, Calendar, and Messages. The File Item can store any generic data, which is stored in file systems as files. But unless an advanced schema is provided for the file, by defining it to be a specialized Item, WinFS will not be able to access its data. Such a file Item can only support being related to other Items.

A developer can extend any of these types, or the base type Item, to provide a type for their custom data. The data contained in an Item is defined in terms of properties, or fields that hold the actual data. For example, an Item Contact may have a field Name that is a ScalarType, and one field Address, a NestedType, which is further composed of two ScalarTypes. To define this type, the base class Item is extended and the necessary fields are added to the class. A NestedType field can be defined as another class that contains the two ScalarType fields. Once the type is defined, a schema has to be defined, which denotes the primitive type of each field, for example, the Name field is a String, the Address field is a custom defined Address class, both the fields of which are Strings. Other primitive types that WinFS supports are Integer, Byte, Decimal, Float, Double, Boolean and DateTime, among others. The schema will also define which fields are mandatory and which are optional. The Contact Item defined in this way will be used to store information regarding the Contact, by populating the properties field and storing it. Only those fields marked as mandatory needs to be filled up during initial save. Other fields may be populated later by the user, or not populated at all. If more properties fields, such as last conversed date, need to be added, this type can be extended to accommodate them. Item types for other data can be defined similarly.

WinFS creates tables for all defined Items. All the fields defined for the Item form the columns of the table and all instances of the Item are stored as rows in the table for the respective Items. Whenever some field in the table refers to data in some other table, it is considered a relationship. The schema of the relationship specifies which tables are involved and what the kind and name of the relationship is. The WinFS runtime manages the relationship schemas. All Items are exposed as .NET CLR objects, with a uniform interface providing access to the data stored in the fields. Thus any application can retrieve object of any Item type and can use the data in the object, without being aware of the physical structure the data was stored in.

WinFS types are exposed as .NET classes, which can be instantiated as .NET objects. Data are stored in these type instances by setting their properties. Once done, they are persisted into the WinFS store. A WinFS store is accessed using an ItemContext class (see Data retrieval section for details). ItemContext allows transactional access to the WinFS store; i.e. all the operations since binding an ItemContext object to a store till it is closed either all succeed or are all rolled back. As changes are made to the data, they are not written to the disc; rather they are written to an in-memory log. Only when the connection is closed are the changes written to the disc in a batch. This helps to optimize disc I/O. The following code snippet, written in C#, creates a contact and stores it in a WinFS store.

Relationships
A datum can be related to one more item, giving rise to a one-to-one relationship, or with more than one items, resulting in a one-to-many relationship. The related items, in turn, may be related to other data items as well, resulting in a network of relationships, which is called a many-to-many relationship. Creating a relationship between two Items creates another field in the data of the Items concerned which refer the row in the other Item's table where the related object is stored. In WinFS, a Relationship is an instance of the base type Relationship, which is extended to signify a specialization of a relation. A Relationship is a mapping between two items, a Source and a Target. The source has an Outgoing Relationship, whereas the target gets an Incoming Relationship. WinFS provides three types of primitive relationships – Holding Relationship, Reference Relationship and Embedding Relationship. Any custom relationship between two data types are instances of these relationship types.

 * Holding Relationships specify ownership and lifetime (which defines how long the relationship is valid) of the Target Item. For example, the Relationship between a folder and a file, and between an Employee and his Salary record, is a Holding Relationship – the latter is to be removed when the former is removed. A Target Item can be a part of more than one Holding Relationships. In such a case, it is to be removed when all the Source Items are removed.
 * Reference Relationships provide linkage between two Items, but do not have any lifetime associated, i.e., each Item will continue to be stored even without the other.
 * Embedding Relationships give order to the two Items that are linked by the Relationship, such as the Relationship between a Parent Item and a Child Item.

Relationships between two Items can either be set programmatically by the application creating the data, or the user can use the WinFS Item Browser to manually relate the Items. A WinFS item browser can also graphically display the items and how they are related, to enable the user to know how their data are organized.

Rules
WinFS includes Rules, which are executed when a certain condition is met. WinFS rules work on data and data relationships. For example, a rule can be created that states that whenever an Item is created which contains field "Name" and if the value of that field is some particular name, a relationship should be created that relates the Item with some other Item. WinFS rules can also access any external application. For example, a rule can be built which launches a Notify application whenever a mail is received from a particular contact. WinFS rules can also be used to add new properties fields to existing data Items.

WinFS rules are also exposed as .NET CLR objects. As such any rule can be used for any purpose. A rule can even be extended by inheriting from it to form a new rule that consists of the condition and action of the parent rule plus something more.

RAV
WinFS supports creating Rich Application Views (RAV) by aggregating different data in a virtual table format. Unlike database view, where each individual element can only be a scalar value, RAVs can have complex Items or even collections of Items. The actual data can be across multiple data types or instances and can even be retrieved by traversing relationships. RAVs are intrinsically paged (dividing the entire set of data into smaller pages containing disconnected subsets of the data) by the WinFS runtime. The page size is defined during creation of the view and the WinFS API exposes methods to iterate over the pages. RAVs also supports modification of the view according to different grouping parameters. Views can also be queried against.

Access control
Even though all data are shared, everything is not equally accessible. WinFS uses the Windows authentication system to provide two data protection mechanisms. First, there is share-level security that controls access to your WinFS share. Second, there is item level security that supports NT compatible security descriptors. The process accessing the item must have enough privileges to access it. Also in Vista there is the concept of "integrity level" for an application. Higher integrity data cannot be accessed by a lower integrity process.

Data retrieval
The primary mode of data retrieval from a WinFS store is querying the WinFS store according to some criteria, which returns an enumerable set of items matching the criteria. The criteria for the query is specified using the OPath query language. The returned data are made available as instances of the type schemas, conforming to the .NET object model. The data in them can be accessed by accessing the properties of individual objects.

Relations are also exposed as properties. Each WinFS Item has two properties, named IncomingRelationships and OutgoingRelationships, which provide access to the set of relationship instances the item participates in. The other item which participates in one relationship instance can be reached through the proper relationship instance.

The fact that the data can be accessed using its description, rather than location, can be used to provide end-user organizational capabilities without limiting to the hierarchical organization as used in file-systems. In a file system, each file or folder is contained in only one folder. But WinFS Items can participate in any number of holding relationships, that too with any other items. As such, end users are not limited to only file/folder organization. Rather, a contact can become a container for documents; a picture a container for contacts and so on. For legacy compatibility, WinFS includes a pseudo-type called Folder, which is present only to participate in holding relationships and emulate file/folder organization. Since any WinFS Item can be related with more than one Folder item, from an end user perspective, an item can reside in multiple folders without duplicating the actual data. Applications can also analyze the relationship graphs to present various filters. For example, an email application can analyze the related contacts and the relationships of the contacts with restaurant bills and dynamically generate filters like "Emails sent to people I had lunch with".

Searches
The WinFS API provides a class called the ItemContext class, which is bound to a WinFS store. The ItemContext object can be used to scope the search to the entire store or a subset of it. It also provides transactional access to the store. An object of this class can then spawn an ItemSearcher object which then takes the type (an object representing the type) of the item to be retrieved or the relationship and the OPath query string representing the criteria for the search. A set of all matches is returned, which can then be bound to a UI widget for displaying en masse or enumerating individually. The properties items can also be modified and then stored back to the data store to update the data. The ItemContext object is closed (which marks the end of association of the object with the store) when the queries are made or changes merged into the store.

Related items can also be accessed through the items. The IncomingRelationships and OutgoingRelationships properties give access to all the set of relationship instances, typed to the name of the relationship. These relationship objects expose the other item via a property. So, for example, if a picture is related to a picture, it can be accessed by traversing the relationship as:

An OPath query string allows to express the parameters that will be queried for to be specified using Item properties, embedded Items as well as Relationships. It can specify a single search condition, such as "title = Something'", or a compound condition such as "title = 'Title 1' || title = 'Title 2' && author = 'Someone'". These boolean and relational operations can be specified using C# like &&, ||, =, != operators as well as their English-like equivalent like EQUAL, NOT EQUAL. SQL like operators such as LIKE, GROUP BY and ORDER BY are also supported, as are wildcard conditions. So, "title LIKE 'any*'" is a valid query string. These operators can be used to execute complex searches such as The above code snippet creates an ItemSearcher object that searches on the OutContactRelationship instance that relates pictures and contacts, in effect searching all pictures related with a contact. It then runs the query Name LIKE 'A*'" on all contacts reachable through OutContactRelationship, returning the list of "contacts whose names start with A and whose pictures I have". Similarly, more relationships could be taken into account to further narrow down the results. Further, a natural language query processor, which parses query in natural language and creates a well-formed OPath query string to search via proper relationships, can allow users to make searches such as "find the name of the wine I had with person X last month", provided financial management applications are using WinFS to store bills.

Different relations specify a different set of data. So when a search is made that encompasses multiple relations, the different sets of data are retrieved individually and a union of the different sets is computed. The resulting set contains only those data items that correspond to all the relations.

Notifications
WinFS includes better support for handling data that changes frequently. Using WinFS Notifications, applications choose to be notified of changes to selected data Items. WinFS will raise an ItemChangedEvent, using the .NET Event model, when a subscribed-to Item changes, and the event will be published to the applications.

Information Agent
WinFS includes an Information Agent feature for the management, retrieval, and storage of end-user notification rules and preferences for changes to items in the data store. Using Information Agent, it is possible to automatically define relations to new items based on events such as appointments, with an example being that appointments can be related to photos based on the dates the photos were taken, enabling queries for birthdays or holidays without needing to know the actual dates of such events ("find all photos taken on this birthday"). Other examples include automatically moving new items to specific folders based on a rule as determined by appointment times and dates the photos were taken ("when I import a photo taken during a business event, move it to the Business Events folder") or more complex possibilities. Information Agent can also forward notifications to other devices ("if I receive a high priority email from my boss, send a notification to my phone") and is similar to Rules and Alerts functionality of Microsoft Outlook.

Data sharing
WinFS allows easy sharing of data between applications, and among multiple WinFS stores, which may reside on different computers, by copying to and from them. A WinFS item can also be copied to a non-WinFS file system, but unless that data item is put back into the WinFS store, it will not support the advanced services provided by WinFS.

The WinFS API also provides some support for sharing with non-WinFS applications. WinFS exposes a shell object to access WinFS stores. This object maps WinFS items to a virtual folder hierarchy, and can be accessed by any application. Virtual folders can automatically share new content referenced by the query with users (a virtual folder for "all vacation photos" can automatically share new items returned by this query with users). WinFS data can also be manually shared using network shares, by sharing the legacy shell object. Non-WinFS file formats can be stored in WinFS stores, using the File Item, provided by WinFS. Importers can be written, to convert specific file formats to WinFS Item types.

In addition, WinFS provides services to automatically synchronize items in two or more WinFS stores, subject to some predefined condition, such as "share only photos" or "share photos that have an associated contact X". The stores may be on different computers. Synchronization is done in a peer-to-peer fashion; there is no central authority. A synchronization can be either manual or automatic or scheduled. During synchronization, WinFS finds the new and modified Items, and updates accordingly. If two or more changes conflict, WinFS can either resort to automatic resolution based on predefined rules, or defer the synchronization for manual resolution. WinFS also updates the schemas, if required.

Shell namespace
WinFS Beta 1 includes a shell namespace extension, which surfaces WinFS stores as top level objects in My Computer view. Files can be copied into and out of the stores, as well as applications can be directly used to save there. Even folders such as My Documents can be redirected to the stores. WinFS uses Importer plug-ins to analyze the files as they were being imported to the store and create proper WinFS schemas and objects, and when taking the objects out, re-pack them into files. If importers for certain files are not installed, they are stored as generic File types.

Microsoft Rave
Microsoft Rave is an application that shipped with WinFS Beta 1. It allows synchronization of two or more WinFS stores, and supports synchronization in full mesh mode as well as the central hub topology. While synchronizing, Microsoft Rave will determine the changes made to each store since the last sync, and update accordingly. When applying the changes, it also detects if there is any conflict, i.e., the same data has been changed on both stores since the last synchronization. It will either log the conflicting data for later resolution or have it resolved immediately. Microsoft Rave uses peer-to-peer technology to communicate and transfer data.

StoreSpy
With WinFS Beta 1, Microsoft included an unsupported application called StoreSpy, which allowed one to browse WinFS stores by presenting a hierarchical view of WinFS Items. It automatically generated virtual folders based on access permissions, date and other metadata, and presented them in a hierarchical tree view, akin to what traditional folders are presented in. The application generated tabs for different Item types. StoreSpy allowed viewing Items, Relationships, MultiSet, Nested Elements, Extensions and other types in the store along with its full metadata. It also presented a search interface to perform manual searches, and save them as virtual folders. The application also presented a graphical view of WinFS Rules. However, it did not allow editing of Items or their properties, though it was slated for inclusion in a future release. But the WinFS project was cut back before it could materialize.

Type Browser
WinFS also includes another application, named WinFS Type Browser, which can be used to browse the WinFS types, as well as visualize the hierarchical relationship between WinFS types. A WinFS type, both built-in types as well as custom schemas, can be visualized along with all the properties and methods that it supports. It also shows the types that it derives from as well as other types that extend the type schema. However, while it was included with WinFS, it was released as an unsupported tool.

OPather
WinFS Beta 1 also includes an unsupported application, named OPather. It presents a graphical interface for writing Opath queries. It can be used by selecting target object type and specifying the parameters of the query. It also includes Intellisense-like parameter completion feature. It can then be used to perform visualization tasks like binding results of a query to a DataGrid control, create views of the data in WinFS itself, or just extract the query string.

Project "Orange"
Microsoft launched a project to build a data visualization application for WinFS. It was codenamed "Project Orange" and was supposedly built using Windows Presentation Foundation. It was supposed to provide exploration of Items stored in WinFS stores, and data relationships were supposed to be a prominent part of the navigation model. It was supposed to let people allow organization of the WinFS stores graphically as well – productizing many of the concepts shown in the IWish Concept Video WMV File. However, since the WinFS project went dark, the status of this project is unknown.

title: WinFS


text:
Nöteborg

Nöteborg may refer to:
 * The Swedish name for Shlisselburg, a town in Kirovsky District of Leningrad Oblast, Russia
 * Battle of Nöteborg, 1702, one of the first sieges of the Great Northern War, when Russian forces captured the Swedish fortress of Nöteborg
 * Siege of Nöteborg, 1656, a siege during the Russo-Swedish War (1656–58)
 * Treaty of Nöteborg, 1323, a peace treaty signed at Orekhovets (Swedish: Nöteborg); the first settlement between Sweden and Novgorod Republic regulating their border

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Nöteborg


text:
Project Blue Book

Project Blue Book was the code name for the systematic study of unidentified flying objects by the United States Air Force from March 1952 to its termination on December 17, 1969. The project, headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, was initially directed by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt and followed projects of a similar nature such as Project Sign established in 1947, and Project Grudge in 1949. Project Blue Book had two goals, namely, to determine if UFOs were a threat to national security, and to scientifically analyze UFO-related data.

Thousands of UFO reports were collected, analyzed, and filed. As a result of the Condon Report, which concluded that the study of UFOs was unlikely to yield major scientific discoveries, and a review of the report by the National Academy of Sciences, Project Blue Book was terminated in 1969. The Air Force supplies the following summary of its investigations:

"# No UFO reported, investigated, and evaluated by the Air Force was ever an indication of threat to our national security;
 * 1) There  was no evidence submitted to or discovered by the Air Force that  sightings categorized as 'unidentified' represented technological  developments or principles beyond the range of modern scientific  knowledge; and
 * 2) There was no evidence indicating that sightings  categorized as 'unidentified' were extraterrestrial vehicles."

By the time Project Blue Book ended, it had collected 12,618 UFO reports, and concluded that most of them were misidentifications of natural phenomena (clouds, stars, etc.) or conventional aircraft. According to the National Reconnaissance Office a number of the reports could be explained by flights of the formerly secret reconnaissance planes U-2 and A-12. 701 reports were classified as unexplained, even after stringent analysis. The UFO reports were archived and are available under the Freedom of Information Act, but names and other personal information of all witnesses have been redacted.

Previous projects
Public USAF UFO studies were first initiated under Project Sign at the end of 1947, following many widely publicized UFO reports (see Kenneth Arnold). Project Sign was initiated specifically at the request of General Nathan Twining, chief of the Air Force Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Wright-Patterson was also to be the home of Project Sign and all subsequent official USAF public investigations.

Project Sign was officially inconclusive regarding the cause of the sightings. However, according to US Air Force Captain Edward J. Ruppelt (the first director of Project Blue Book), Sign's initial intelligence estimate (the so-called Estimate of the Situation) written in the late summer of 1948, concluded that the flying saucers were real craft, were not made by either the Soviet Union or United States, and were likely extraterrestrial in origin. (See also extraterrestrial hypothesis.) This was subsequently rejected by Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg, USAF Chief of Staff, citing a lack of physical proof. Vandenberg subsequently dismantled Project Sign.

Project Sign was succeeded at the end of 1948 by Project Grudge, which was criticized as having a debunking mandate. Ruppelt referred to the era of Project Grudge as the "dark ages" of early USAF UFO investigation. Grudge concluded that all UFOs were natural phenomena or other misinterpretations, although it also stated that 23 percent of the reports could not be explained.

Captain Ruppelt era
According to Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, by the end of 1951, several high-ranking, very influential USAF generals were so dissatisfied with the state of Air Force UFO investigations that they dismantled Project Grudge and replaced it with Project Blue Book in March 1952. One of these men was Gen. Charles P. Cabell. Another important change came when General William Garland joined Cabell's staff; Garland thought the UFO question deserved serious scrutiny because he had witnessed a UFO.

The new name, Project Blue Book, was selected to refer to the blue booklets used for testing at some colleges and universities. The name was inspired, said Ruppelt, by the close attention that high-ranking officers were giving the new project; it felt as if the study of UFOs was as important as a college final exam. Blue Book was also upgraded in status from Project Grudge, with the creation of the Aerial Phenomenon Branch.

Ruppelt was the first head of the project. He was an experienced airman, having been decorated for his efforts with the Army Air Corps during World War II, and having afterward earned an aeronautics degree. He officially coined the term "Unidentified Flying Object", to replace the many terms ("flying saucer", "flying disk" and so on) the military had previously used; Ruppelt thought that "unidentified flying object" was a more neutral and accurate term. Ruppelt resigned from the Air Force some years later and wrote the book The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, which described the study of UFOs by the United States Air Force from 1947 to 1955. American scientist Michael D. Swords wrote that "Ruppelt would lead the last genuine effort to analyze UFOs".

Ruppelt implemented a number of changes: He streamlined the manner in which UFOs were reported to (and by) military officials, partly in hopes of alleviating the stigma and ridicule associated with UFO witnesses. Ruppelt also ordered the development of a standard questionnaire for UFO witnesses, hoping to uncover data that could be subject to statistical analysis. He commissioned the Battelle Memorial Institute to create the questionnaire and computerize the data. Using case reports and the computerized data, Battelle then conducted a massive scientific and statistical study of all Air Force UFO cases, completed in 1954 and known as "Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14" (see summary below).

Knowing that factionalism had harmed the progress of Project Sign, Ruppelt did his best to avoid the kinds of open-ended speculation that had led to Sign's personnel being split among advocates and critics of the extraterrestrial hypothesis. As Michael Hall writes, "Ruppelt not only took the job seriously but expected his staff to do so as well. If anyone under him either became too skeptical or too convinced of one particular theory, they soon found themselves off the project". In his book, Ruppelt reported that he fired three personnel very early in the project because they were either "too pro" or "too con" one hypothesis or another. Ruppelt sought the advice of many scientists and experts, and issued regular press releases (along with classified monthly reports for military intelligence).

Each U.S. Air Force Base had a Blue Book officer to collect UFO reports and forward them to Ruppelt. During most of Ruppelt's tenure, he and his team were authorized to interview any and all military personnel who witnessed UFOs and were not required to follow the chain of command. This unprecedented authority underlined the seriousness of Blue Book's investigation.

Under Ruppelt's direction, Blue Book investigated a number of well-known UFO cases, including the so-called Lubbock Lights, and a widely publicized 1952 radar/visual case over Washington D.C. According to Jacques Vallée, Ruppelt started the trend, largely followed by later Blue Book investigations, of not giving serious consideration to numerous reports of UFO landings and/or interaction with purported UFO occupants.

Astronomer J. Allen Hynek was the scientific consultant of the project. He had been with Projects Sign and Grudge. He worked for the project up to its termination and initially created the categorization which has been extended and is known today as Close encounters. He was a pronounced skeptic when he started, but said that his feelings changed to a more wavering skepticism during the research, after encountering a minority of UFO reports he thought were unexplainable.

Ruppelt left Blue Book in February 1953 for a temporary reassignment. He returned a few months later to find his staff reduced from more than ten, to two subordinates. Frustrated, Ruppelt suggested that an Air Defense Command unit (the 4602nd Air Intelligence Service Squadron) be charged with UFO investigations.

Robertson Panel
In July 1952, after a build-up of hundreds of sightings over the previous few months, a series of radar detections coincident with visual sightings were observed near the National Airport in Washington, D.C. (see 1952 Washington D.C. UFO incident).

After much publicity, these sightings led the Central Intelligence Agency to establish a panel of scientists headed by H. P. Robertson, a physicist of the California Institute of Technology, which included various physicists, meteorologists, and engineers, and one astronomer (Hynek). The Robertson Panel first met on January 14, 1953 in order to formulate a response to the overwhelming public interest in UFOs.

Ruppelt, Hynek, and others presented the best evidence, including movie footage, that had been collected by Blue Book. After spending 12 hours reviewing 6 years of data, the Robertson Panel concluded that most UFO reports had prosaic explanations and that all could be explained with further investigation, which they deemed not worth the effort.

In their final report, they stressed that low-grade, unverifiable UFO reports were overloading intelligence channels, with the risk of missing a genuine conventional threat to the U.S. Therefore, they recommended the Air Force de-emphasize the subject of UFOs and embark on a debunking campaign to lessen public interest. They suggested debunkery through the mass media, including Walt Disney Productions, and using psychologists, astronomers, and celebrities to ridicule the phenomenon and put forward prosaic explanations. Furthermore, civilian UFO groups "should be watched because of their potentially great influence on mass thinking ... The apparent irresponsibility and the possible use of such groups for subversive purposes should be kept in mind."

It is the conclusion of many researchers that the Robertson Panel was recommending controlling public opinion through a program of official propaganda and spying. They also believe these recommendations helped shape Air Force policy regarding UFO study not only immediately afterward, but also into the present day. There is evidence that the Panel's recommendations were being carried out at least two decades after its conclusions were issued (see the main article for details and citations).

In December 1953, Joint Army-Navy-Air Force Regulation number 146 made it a crime for military personnel to discuss classified UFO reports with unauthorized persons. Violators faced up to two years in prison and/or fines of up to $10,000.

Aftermath of Robertson Panel
In his book (see external links) Ruppelt described the demoralization of the Blue Book staff and the stripping of their investigative duties following the Robertson Panel jurisdiction.

As an immediate consequence of the Robertson Panel recommendations, in February 1953, the Air Force issued Regulation 200-2, ordering air base officers to publicly discuss UFO incidents only if they were judged to have been solved, and to classify all the unsolved cases to keep them out of the public eye.

The same month, investigative duties started to be taken on by the newly formed 4602nd Air Intelligence Squadron (AISS) of the Air Defense Command. The 4602nd AISS was assigned the task of investigating only the most important UFO cases with intelligence or national security implications. These cases were deliberately siphoned away from Blue Book, leaving Blue Book to deal with the more trivial reports.

General Nathan Twining, who started Project Sign in 1947, was now Air Force Chief of Staff. In August 1954, he was to further codify the responsibilities of the 4602nd AISS by issuing an updated Air Force Regulation 200-2. In addition, UFOs (called "UFOBs") were defined as "any airborne object which by performance, aerodynamic characteristics, or unusual features, does not conform to any presently known aircraft or missile type, or which cannot be positively identified as a familiar object." Investigation of UFOs was stated to be for the purposes of national security and to ascertain "technical aspects." AFR 200-2 again stated that Blue Book could discuss UFO cases with the media only if they were regarded as having a conventional explanation. If they were unidentified, the media was to be told only that the situation was being analyzed. Blue Book was also ordered to reduce the number of unidentified to a minimum.

All this work was done secretly. The public face of Blue Book continued to be the official Air Force investigation of UFOs, but the reality was it had essentially been reduced to doing very few serious investigations and had become almost solely a public relations outfit with a debunking mandate. To cite one example, by the end of 1956, the number of cases listed as unsolved had dipped to barely 0.4 percent, from 20 to 30% only a few years earlier.

Eventually, Ruppelt requested reassignment; at his departure in August 1953, his staff had been reduced from more than ten (precise numbers of personnel varied) to just two subordinates and himself. His temporary replacement was a noncommissioned officer. Most who succeeded him as Blue Book director exhibited either apathy or outright hostility to the subject of UFOs or were hampered by a lack of funding and official support.

UFO investigators often regard Ruppelt's brief tenure at Blue Book as the high-water mark of public Air Force investigations of UFOs, when UFO investigations were treated seriously and had support at high levels. Thereafter, Project Blue Book descended into a new "Dark Ages" from which many UFO investigators argue it never emerged. However, Ruppelt later came to embrace the Blue Book perspective that there was nothing extraordinary about UFOs; he even labeled the subject a "Space Age Myth".

Captain Hardin era
In March 1954, Captain Charles Hardin was appointed the head of Blue Book; however, the 4602nd conducted most UFO investigations, and Hardin did not object. Ruppelt wrote that Hardin "thinks that anyone who is even interested [in UFOs] is crazy. They bore him."

In 1955, the Air Force decided that the goal of Blue Book should not be to investigate UFO reports but to minimize the number of unidentified UFO reports. By late 1956, the number of unidentified sightings had dropped from the 20–25% of the Ruppelt era to less than 1%.

Captain Gregory era
Captain George T. Gregory took over as Blue Book's director in 1956. Clark writes that Gregory led Blue Book "in an even firmer anti-UFO direction than the apathetic Hardin." The 4602nd was dissolved, and the 1066th Air Intelligence Service Squadron was charged with UFO investigations.

In fact, there was actually little or no investigation of UFO reports; a revised AFR 200-2 issued during Gregory's tenure emphasized that unexplained UFO reports must be reduced to a minimum.

One way that Gregory reduced the number of unexplained UFOs was by simple reclassification. "Possible cases" became "probable", and "probable" cases were upgraded to certainties. By this logic, a possible comet became a probable comet, while a probable comet was flatly declared to have been a misidentified comet. Similarly, if a witness reported an observation of an unusual balloon - like object, Blue Book usually classified it as a balloon, with no research and qualification. These procedures became standard for most of Blue Book's later investigations; see Hynek's comments below.

Major Friend era
Lt. Col. Robert J. Friend was appointed the head of Blue Book in 1958. Friend made some attempts to reverse the direction Blue Book had taken since 1954. Clark writes that "Friend's efforts to upgrade the files and catalog sightings according to various observed statistics were frustrated by a lack of funding and assistance."

Heartened by Friend's efforts, Hynek organized the first of several meetings between Blue Book staffers and ATIC personnel in 1959. Hynek suggested that some older UFO reports should be reevaluated, with the ostensible aim of moving them from the "unknown" to the "identified" category. Hynek's plans came to naught.

During Friend's tenure, ATIC contemplated passing the oversight of Blue Book to another Air Force agency, but neither the Air Research and Development Center nor the Office of Information for the Secretary of the Air Force was interested.

In 1960, there were U.S. Congressional hearings regarding UFOs. Civilian UFO research group NICAP had publicly charged Blue Book with covering up UFO evidence and had also acquired a few allies in the U.S. Congress. Blue Book was investigated by the Congress and the CIA, with critics - most notably, the civilian UFO group NICAP asserting that Blue Book was lacking as a scientific study. In response, ATIC added personnel (increasing the total personnel to three military personnel, plus civilian secretaries) and increased Blue Book's budget. This seemed to mollify some of Blue Book's critics, but it was only temporary. A few years later (see below), the criticism would be even louder.

By the time he was transferred from Blue Book in 1963, Friend thought that Blue Book was effectively useless and ought to be dissolved, even if it caused an outcry amongst the public.

Major Quintanilla era
Major Hector Quintanilla took over as Blue Book's leader in August 1963. He largely continued the debunking efforts, and it was under his direction that Blue Book received some of its sharpest criticism. UFO researcher Jerome Clark goes so far as to write that, by this time, Blue Book had "lost all credibility."

Physicist and UFO researcher James E. McDonald once flatly declared that Quintanilla was "not competent" from either a scientific or an investigative perspective, although he also stressed that Quintanilla "shouldn't be held accountable for it," as he was chosen for his position by a superior officer, and was following orders in directing Blue Book.

Blue Book's explanations of UFO reports were not universally accepted, however, and critics—including some scientists—suggested that Project Blue Book performed questionable research or, worse, was perpetrating cover up. This criticism grew especially strong and widespread in the 1960s.

Take, for example, the many mostly nighttime UFO reports from the midwestern and southeastern United States in the summer of 1965: Witnesses in Texas reported "multicolored lights" and large aerial objects shaped like eggs or diamonds. The Oklahoma Highway Patrol reported that Tinker Air Force Base (near Oklahoma City) had tracked up to four UFOs simultaneously, and that several of them had descended very rapidly: from about 22000 feet to about 4000 feet in just a few seconds, an action well beyond the capabilities of conventional aircraft of the era. John Shockley, a meteorologist from Wichita, Kansas, reported that, using the state Weather Bureau radar, he tracked a number of odd aerial objects flying at altitudes between about 6000 and 9000 feet. These and other reports received wide publicity.

Project Blue Book officially determined the witnesses had mistaken Jupiter or bright stars (such as Rigel or Betelgeuse) for something else.

Blue Book's explanation was widely criticized as inaccurate. Robert Riser, director of the Oklahoma Science and Art Foundation Planetarium offered a strongly worded rebuke of Project Blue Book that was widely circulated: "That is as far from the truth as you can get. These stars and planets are on the opposite side of the earth from Oklahoma City at this time of year. The Air Force must have had its star finder upside-down during August".

A newspaper editorial from the Richmond News Leader opined that "Attempts to dismiss the reported sightings under the rationale as exhibited by Project Bluebook [sic] won't solve the mystery ... and serve only to heighten the suspicion that there's something out there that the air force doesn't want us to know about", while a Wichita-based UPI reporter noted  that "Ordinary radar does not pick up planets and stars".

Another case that Blue Book's critics seized upon was the so-called Portage County UFO Chase, which began at about 5.00 am, near Ravenna, Ohio on April 17, 1966. Police officers Dale Spaur and Wilbur Neff spotted what they described as a disc-shaped, silvery object with a bright light emanating from its underside, at about 1000 feet in altitude. They began following the object (which they reported sometimes descended as low as 50 feet), and police from several other jurisdictions were involved in the pursuit. The chase ended about 30 minutes later near Freedom, Pennsylvania, some 85 miles away.

The UFO chase made national news, and the police submitted detailed reports to Blue Book. Five days later, following brief interviews with only one of the police officers (but none of the other ground witnesses), Blue Book's director, Major Hector Quintanilla, announced their conclusions: The police (one of them an Air Force gunner during the Korean War) had first chased a communications satellite, then the planet Venus.

This conclusion was widely derided, and police officers strenuously rejected it. In his dissenting conclusion, Hynek described Blue Book's conclusions as absurd: in their reports, several of the police had unknowingly described the Moon, Venus and the UFO, though they unknowingly described Venus as a bright "star" very near the Moon. Ohio Congressman William Stanton said that "The Air Force has suffered a great loss of prestige in this community ... Once people entrusted with the public welfare no longer think the people can handle the truth, then the people, in return, will no longer trust the government".

In September 1968, Hynek received a letter from Colonel Raymond Sleeper of the Foreign Technology Division. Sleeper noted that Hynek had publicly accused Blue Book of shoddy science, and further asked Hynek to offer advice on how Blue Book could improve its scientific methods. Hynek was to later declare that Sleeper's letter was "the first time in my 20 year association with the air force as scientific consultant that I had been officially asked for criticism and advice [regarding] ... the UFO problem".

Hynek wrote a detailed response, dated October 7, 1968, suggesting several areas where Blue Book could improve. In part, he wrote:

1. ... neither of the two missions of Blue Book [determining if UFOs are a threat to national security and using scientific data gathered by Blue Book] are being adequately executed.

2. The staff of Blue Book, both in numbers and in scientific training, is grossly inadequate ...

3. Blue Book suffers ... in that it is a closed system ... there is virtually no scientific dialogue between Blue Book and the outside scientific world ...

4. The statistical methods employed by Blue Book are nothing less than a travesty.

5. There has been a lack of attention to significant UFO cases ... and too much time spent on routine cases ... and on peripheral public relations tasks. Concentration could be on two or three potentially scientific significant cases per month [instead of being] spread thin over 40 to 70 cases per month.

6. The information input to Blue Book is grossly inadequate. An impossible load is placed on Blue Book by the almost consistent failure of UFO officers at local air bases to transmit adequate information ...

7. The basic attitude and approach within Blue Book is illogical and unscientific ...

8. Inadequate use had been made of the Project scientific consultant [Hynek himself]. Only cases that the project monitor deems worthwhile are brought to his attention. His scope of operation ... has been consistently thwarted ... He often learns of interesting cases only a month or two after the receipt of the report at Blue Book.

Despite Sleeper's request for criticism, none of Hynek's commentary resulted in any substantial changes in Blue Book.

Quintanilla's own perspective on the project is documented in his manuscript, "UFOs, An Air Force Dilemma." Lt. Col Quintanilla wrote the manuscript in 1975, but it was not published until after his death in 1998. Quintanilla states in the text that he personally believed it arrogant to think human beings were the only intelligent life in the universe. Yet, while he found it highly likely that intelligent life existed beyond earth, he had no hard evidence of any extraterrestrial visitation.

Congressional hearing
In 1966, a string of UFO sightings in Massachusetts and New Hampshire provoked a Congressional Hearing by the House Committee on Armed Services. According to attachments to the hearing, the Air Force had at first stated that the sightings were the result of a training exercise happening in the area. But NICAP, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, reported that there was no record of a plane flying at the time the sightings occurred. Another report alleged that the UFO was actually a flying billboard advertising gasoline. Raymond Fowler (of NICAP) added his own interviews with the locals, who saw Air Force officers confiscating newspapers with the story of UFOs and telling them not to report what they had seen. Two police officers who had witnessed the UFOs, Eugene Bertrand and David Hunt, wrote a letter to Major Quintanilla stating that they felt their reputations were destroyed by the Air Force. "It was impossible to mistake what we saw for any kind of military operation, regardless of altitude," the irritated officers wrote, adding that there was no way it could have been a balloon or helicopter. According to Secretary Harold Brown of the Air Force, Blue Book consisted of three steps: investigation, analysis, and the distribution of information gathered to interested parties. After Brown gave permission, the press were invited into the hearing. By the time of the hearing, Blue Book had identified and explained 95% of the reported UFO sightings. None of these were extraterrestrial or a threat to national security. Brown himself proclaimed, "I know of no one of scientific standing or executive standing with a detailed knowledge of this, in our organization who believes that they came from extraterrestrial sources." J. Allen Hynek, a science consultant to Blue Book, suggested in an unedited statement that a "civilian panel of physical and social scientists" be formed "for the express purpose of determining whether a major problem really exist" in regards to UFOs. Hynek remarked that he has "not seen any evidence to confirm" extraterrestrials, "nor do I know any competent scientist who has, or who believes that any kind of extraterrestrial intelligence is involved."

Condon Committee
Criticism of Blue Book continued to grow through the mid-1960s. NICAP's membership ballooned to about 15,000, and the group charged the U.S. Government with a cover-up of UFO evidence.

Following U.S. Congressional hearings, the Condon Committee was established in 1966, ostensibly as a neutral scientific research body. However, the Committee became mired in controversy, with some members charging director Edward U. Condon with bias, and critics would question the validity and the scientific rigor of the Condon Report.

In the end, the Condon Committee suggested that there was nothing extraordinary about UFOs, and while it left a minority of cases unexplained, the report also argued that further research would not be likely to yield significant results.

End
In response to the Condon Committee's conclusions, Secretary of the Air Force Robert C. Seamans, Jr. announced that Blue Book would soon be closed because further funding "cannot be justified either on the grounds of national security or in the interest of science." The last publicly acknowledged day of Blue Book operations was December 17, 1969. However, researcher Brad Sparks, citing research from the May 1970 issue of NICAP's UFO Investigator, reports that the last day of Blue Book activity was actually January 30, 1970. According to Sparks, Air Force officials wanted to keep the Air Force's reaction to the UFO problem from overlapping into a fourth decade, and thus altered the date of Blue Book's closure in official files.

Blue Book's files were sent to the Air Force Archives at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. Major David Shea was to later claim that Maxwell was chosen because it was "accessible yet not too inviting."

Ultimately, Project Blue Book stated that UFOs sightings were generated as a result of:
 * A mild form of mass hysteria.
 * Individuals who fabricate such reports to perpetrate a hoax or seek publicity.
 * Psychopathological persons.
 * Misidentification of various conventional objects.

In April 2003, the USAF publicly indicated that there were no immediate plans to re-establish any official government UFO study programs. However, in December 2017 it was disclosed that a new secret UFO study titled the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) was funded at 22 million dollars from 2007 to 2012.

USAF official statement on UFOs
Below is the United States Air Force's official statement regarding UFOs, as noted in USAF Fact Sheet 95-03:

"From 1947 to 1969, the Air Force investigated Unidentified Flying Objects under Project Blue Book. The project, headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, was terminated on December 17, 1969. Of a total of 12,618 sightings reported to Project Blue Book, 701 remained 'unidentified.'

The decision to discontinue UFO investigations was based on an evaluation of a report prepared by the University of Colorado entitled, 'Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects;' a review of the University of Colorado's report by the National Academy of Sciences; previous UFO studies and Air Force experience investigating UFO reports during 1940 to 1969.

As a result of these investigations, studies and experience gained from investigating UFO reports since 1948, the conclusions of Project Blue Book were:

 * 1) No UFO reported, investigated, and evaluated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to our national security.
 * 2) There has been no evidence submitted to or discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as 'unidentified' represent technological developments or principles beyond the range of present-day scientific knowledge.
 * 3) There has been no evidence indicating the sightings categorized as 'unidentified' are extraterrestrial vehicles.

With the termination of Project Blue Book, the Air Force regulation establishing and controlling the program for investigating and analyzing UFOs was rescinded. Documentation regarding the former Blue Book investigation was permanently transferred to the Modern Military Branch, National Archives and Records Service, and is available for public review and analysis.

Since the termination of Project Blue Book, nothing has occurred that would support a resumption of UFO investigations by the Air Force.

There are a number of universities and professional scientific organizations that have considered UFO phenomena during periodic meetings and seminars. A list of private organizations interested in aerial phenomena may be found in 'Encyclopaedia of Associations', published by Gale Research. Interest in and timely review of UFO reports by private groups ensures that sound evidence is not overlooked by the scientific community. Persons wishing to report UFO sightings should be advised to contact local law enforcement agencies."

Post-Blue Book U.S.A.F. UFO activities
An Air Force memorandum (released via the Freedom of Information Act) dated October 20, 1969, and signed by Brigadier General Carroll H. "Rip" Bolender (the Deputy Director of Development and Acquisitions under the Air Force's Deputy Chief of Staff, Research and Development) states that even after Blue Book was dissolved, that "reports of UFOs" would still "continue to be handled through the standard Air Force procedure designed for this purpose." Furthermore, wrote Bolender, "Reports of unidentified flying objects which could affect national security ... are not part of the Blue Book system." To date, these other investigation channels, agencies or groups (and Bolender's involvement therein) are unknown. Upon drafting the memo, Bolender, who assumed his generalship in 1965, had recently completed a detached tour as Program Manager for Lunar Excursion Module Operations in the Apollo program, likely reporting to fellow detached Air Force officer Samuel C. Phillips. He would continue to serve in this position and rank until he retired from the Air Force in 1972.

Additionally, author Howard Blum reports that Freedom of Information Act requests show that the U.S. Air Force has continued to catalog and track UFO sightings, particularly a series of dozens of UFO encounters from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s that occurred at U.S. military facilities with nuclear weapons. Blum writes that some of these official documents depart drastically from the normally dry and bureaucratic wording of government paperwork, making obvious the sense of "terror" that these UFO incidents inspired in many U.S.A.F. personnel.

Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14
In late December 1951, Ruppelt met with members of the Battelle Memorial Institute, a think tank based in Columbus, Ohio. Ruppelt wanted their experts to assist them in making the Air Force UFO study more scientific. It was the Battelle Institute that devised the standardized reporting form. Starting in late March 1952, the Institute started analyzing existing sighting reports and encoding about 30 report characteristics onto IBM punched cards for computer analysis.

Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14 was their massive statistical analysis of Blue Book cases to date, some 3200 by the time the report was completed in 1954, after Ruppelt had left Blue Book. Even today, it represents the largest such study ever undertaken. Battelle employed four scientific analysts, who sought to divide cases into "knowns", "unknowns", and a third category of "insufficient information." They also broke down knowns and unknowns into four categories of quality, from excellent to poor. E.g., cases deemed excellent might typically involve experienced witnesses such as airline pilots or trained military personnel, multiple witnesses, corroborating evidence such as radar contact or photographs, etc. In order for a case to be deemed a "known", only two analysts had to independently agree on a solution. However, for a case to be called an "unknown", all four analysts had to agree. Thus the criterion for an "unknown" was quite stringent.

In addition, sightings were broken down into six different characteristics—color, number, duration of observation, brightness, shape, and speed and then these characteristics were compared between knowns and unknowns to see if there was a statistically significant difference.

The main results of the statistical analysis were:
 * About 69% of the cases were judged known or identified (38% were considered conclusively identified while 31% were still "doubtfully" explained); about 9% fell into insufficient information. About 22% were deemed "unknown", down from the earlier 28% value of the Air Force studies.
 * In the known category, 86% of the knowns were aircraft, balloons, or had astronomical explanations. Only 1.5% of all cases were judged to be psychological or "crackpot" cases. A "miscellaneous" category comprised 8% of all cases and included possible hoaxes.
 * The higher the quality of the case, the more likely it was to be classified unknown. 35% of the excellent cases were deemed unknowns, as opposed to only 18% of the poorest cases.

(More detailed statistics can be found at Identified flying objects.)

Despite this, the summary section of the Battelle Institute's final report declared it was "highly improbable that any of the reports of unidentified aerial objects ... represent observations of technological developments outside the range of present-day knowledge." A number of researchers, including Bruce Maccabee, who extensively reviewed the data, have noted that the conclusions of the analysts were usually at odds with their own statistical results, displayed in 240 charts, tables, graphs and maps. Some conjecture that the analysts may simply have had trouble accepting their own results or may have written the conclusions to satisfy the new political climate within Blue Book following the Robertson Panel.

When the Air Force finally made Special Report #14 public in October 1955, it was claimed that the report scientifically proved that UFOs did not exist. Critics of this claim note that the report actually proved that the "unknowns" were distinctly different from the "knowns" at a very high statistical significance level. The Air Force also incorrectly claimed that only 3% of the cases studied were unknowns, instead of the actual 22%. They further claimed that the residual 3% would probably disappear if more complete data were available. Critics counter that this ignored the fact that the analysts had already thrown such cases into the category of "insufficient information", whereas both "knowns" and "unknowns" were deemed to have sufficient information to make a determination. Also, the "unknowns" tended to represent the higher quality cases, q.e. reports that already had better information and witnesses.

The result of the monumental BMI study was echoed by a 1979 French GEPAN report which stated that about a quarter of over 1,600 closely studied UFO cases defied explanation, stating, in part, "These cases ... pose a real question." When GEPAN's successor SEPRA closed in 2004, 5800 cases had been analyzed, and the percentage of inexplicable unknowns had dropped to about 14%. The head of SEPRA, Jean-Jacques Velasco, found the evidence of extraterrestrial origins so convincing in these remaining unknowns, that he wrote a book about it in 2005.

Criticism
Hynek was an associate member of the Robertson Panel, which recommended that UFOs needed debunking. A few years later, however, Hynek claimed that Air Force personnel were indifferent, incompetent, and conducted shoddy research. Hynek notes that during its existence, critics dubbed Blue Book "The Society for the Explanation of the Uninvestigated." Regarding Ruppelt, Hynek wrote, "In my contacts with him I found him to be honest and seriously puzzled about the whole phenomenon," and of Friend he wrote, "Of all the officers I worked with in Blue Book, Colonel Friend earned my respect [and] conducted himself with dignity and a total lack of the bombast that characterized several of the other Blue Book heads." Hynek claimed that Quintanilla "disregard[ed] any evidence that was counter to his hypothesis." Hynek also reported bitter exchanges with Moody, describing Moody as "the master of the possible: possible balloon, possible aircraft, possible birds, which then became, by his own hand (and I argued with him violently at times) the probable."

Author and columnist Robert Sheaffer has written that Project Blue Book "amassed 12,618 reports, and none of them amounted to anything significant, or added to our knowledge of any subject, even after more than 50 years of investigation."

Project UFO
Jack Webb produced and narrated Project UFO, a 1978-79 TV series based on Project Blue Book (though shifting the investigation to the present day rather than its original 1950s-60s era.)

The series followed two Air Force investigators, (William Jordan as Major Jake Gatlin, replaced in the second season by Edward Winter as Major Ben Ryan,) and Caskey Swaim as Staff Sergeant (later Technical Sergeant) Harry Fitz, covering a wide variety of UFO incidents.

A former Project Blue Book officer served as the technical advisor for the series. Each episode ended with the statement "The United States Air Force, after twenty-two years of investigations, concluded that none of the unidentified flying objects reported and evaluated posed a threat to our national security." superimposed over the USAF seal.

Twin Peaks
Project Blue Book played a major role in the second season of the 1990–1991 TV series Twin Peaks. Major Garland Briggs, an Air Force officer who worked on the program, approaches protagonist Dale Cooper and reveals that Cooper's name turned up in an otherwise nonsensical radio transmission intercepted by the Air Force, which inexplicably originated from the woods surrounding the town of Twin Peaks. As the season progresses, it is revealed that the source of the transmission is the transdimensional realm of the Black Lodge, inhabited by beings which feed on the human emotions of pain and suffering; it eventually comes out that Briggs worked with Cooper's rival, corrupt FBI agent Windom Earle, on Project Blue Book, and that the two men apparently uncovered evidence of the Lodge during the course of their work.

Galactica 1980
Every episode of the original Battlestar Galactica spin-off series Galactica 1980 ended with a short statement about the U.S. Air Force's 1969 Project Blue Book findings that UFOs are not proven to exist and "are not a threat to national security".

Project Blue Book (2019)
Project Blue Book is the inspiration for the drama series Project Blue Book, which began airing on the History Channel in January 2019.

title: Project Blue Book


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Chinese Buddhist canon

The Chinese Buddhist canon refers to a specific collection of Chinese language Buddhist literature that is deemed canonical in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese Buddhism. The traditional term for the canon is "Great Storage of Scriptures". The concept of the Chinese Buddhist canon was influenced by the Indian Buddhist concept of a Tripitaka, literally meaning 'three baskets' - sutras, Vinaya, and Abhidharma. However, Chinese Buddhists historically did not have access to a Tripitaka of Indian Buddhist texts. Rather, individual texts were brought to China individually or in small batches and translated one-by-one. This led to the creation of a distinct Chinese Buddhist canon.

Contents
The Chinese Buddhist canon includes Āgama, Vinaya and Abhidharma texts from Early Buddhist schools, as well as the Mahāyāna sūtras and scriptures from Esoteric Buddhism. The Taishō Daizōkyō is the standard modern edition as systematized by Japanese scholars, published in Japan from 1924 to 1929. The Taisho has fifty-five volumes and 2,184 texts, in the following categories:

A supplement to the Taishō Daizōkyō was published in 1934. It contains forty-five volumes with 736 other texts, including Japanese texts, texts recently found at Dunhuang, apocryphal texts composed in China, iconographies and bibliographies.
 * 1) Āgamas (equivalent to the Pali Nikāyas) and the Jātakas (219 texts in four vols.).
 * 2) Mahāyāna Sūtras, grouped into the following sections: Prajñaparamita, Lotus Sūtra, the Avatamsaka, the Ratnakūta, the Mahāparinirvāna, the Mahā-sannipāta and general ‘Sūtras’ (mostly Mahāyāna) (627 texts in thirteen vols.).
 * 3) Buddhist Tantras (572 texts in four vols.).
 * 4) Vinayas and some texts outlining Bodhisattvas ethics (eighty-six texts in three vols.).
 * 5) Commentaries on the Āgamas and Mahāyāna Sūtras (thirty-one texts in three vols.).
 * 6) Abhidharma texts (twenty-eight texts in four vols.).
 * 7) Mādhyamika, Yogācāra and other Śāstras (‘Treatises’ (129 texts in three vols.)).
 * 8) Chinese commentaries (twelve vols.).
 * 9) Chinese sectarian writings (five vols.).
 * 10) Histories and biographies (95 texts in four vols.).
 * 11) Encyclopaedias, dictionaries, non-Buddhist works (Hindu, Manichaean, and Nestorian Christian), and catalogues of various Chinese Canons (sixty-four texts in three vols.).

Versions
There are many versions of the canon in East Asia in different places and time. An early version is the Fangshan Stone Sutras (房山石經) from the 7th century. The first printed version of the Chinese Buddhist canon was the 開寶藏 Kaibao Canon, printed by order of Emperor Taizu of Song in the fourth year of the Kaibao era (971). The blocks used to print the Kaibao Canon were lost in the fall of the Northern Song capital Kaifeng in 1127 and there only about twelve fascicles of copies surviving. However, the Kaibao formed the basis for future printed versions that survive intact.

The earlier Qianlong Tripitaka (乾隆藏) and Jiaxing Tripitaka (嘉興藏) are still completely extant in printed form. The Zhaocheng Jin Tripitaka is the most complete earliest tripitaka to survive to this day. The Tripiṭaka Koreana and the Qianlong Tripitaka are the only tripitakas for which we still have the complete set of wood blocks. The Tripiṭaka Koreana or Palman Daejanggyeong was carved between 1236 and 1251, during Korea's Goryeo Dynasty, onto 81,340 wooden printing blocks with no known errors in the 52,382,960 characters. It is stored at the Haeinsa temple, South Korea.

One of the most used version is Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō (, 大正新脩大藏經). Named after the Taishō era, a modern standardized edition originally published in Tokyo between 1924 and 1934 in 100 volumes. It is also one of the most completely punctuated tripitaka. The history of the Chinese Buddhist canon, including versions that have not survived, has been studied through the use of catalogs. A well known catalog that is included in the Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō the Kaiyuan Shijiao Lu 開元釋教錄 (Taisho no. 2154). Other catalogs are included in Volume 55.

The Xuzangjing (卍續藏) version, which is a supplement of another version of the canon, is often used as a supplement for Buddhist texts not collected in the . The Jiaxing Tripitaka is a supplement for Ming dynasty and Qing dynasty Buddhist texts not collected, and a Dazangjing Bu Bian (大藏經補編) published in 1986 are supplements of them.

The Chinese Manuscripts in the Tripitaka Sinica (中華大藏經–漢文部份 Zhonghua Dazangjing: Hanwen bufen), a new collection of canonical texts, was published by Zhonghua Book Company in Beijing in 1983–97, with 107 volumes of literature, are photocopies of early versions and include many newly unearthed scriptures from Dunhuang. There are newer Tripitaka Sinica projects.

Languages
Mostly written in Classical Chinese. The Mi Tripitaka (蕃大藏經) is the Tangut canon. Eric Grinstead published a collection of Tangut Buddhist texts under the title The Tangut Tripitaka in 1971 in New Delhi. The Taishō edition contains classical Japanese works. The Dunhuang edition contains some works in old Western Regions languages. The Tripitaka Sinica mentioned above features a Tibetan section.

Non-collected works
A number of apocryphal sutras composed in China are excluded in the earlier canons, such as composed stories the Journey to the West and Chinese folk religion texts,    and High King Avalokiteshvara Sutra. Modern religious and scholarly works are also excluded but they are published in other book series.

title: Chinese Buddhist canon