Abstract: The subject innovation provides a system and/or a method that facilitates developing schemas for a file storage system. A type definition component can provide a schema grammar, wherein a generator component can employ the schema grammar to build the schema for the file storage system. The schema grammar can describe information types stored in the file storage system that are represented as instances of complex types that are part of a type system that supports inheritance. The schema grammar can support a declaration of an association between types, versioning specifications, and/or content indexing specifications.

Abstract: A programming interface for a computer platform can include various functionality. In certain embodiments, the programming interface includes one or more of the following groups of types or functions: those related to core file system concepts, those related to entities that a human being can contact, those related to documents, those common to multiple kinds of media, those specific to audio media, those specific to video media, those specific to image media, those specific to electronic mail messages, and those related to identifying particular locations.

Abstract: By modeling real-world application objects with complex structures, behaviors, and operations described by a schema which is enforced by the hardware/software interface system, various embodiments of the present invention provide rich sub-typing functionality by extending Items (and Item types) using “Extensions” which provide additional data structures (Properties, Relationships, etc.) to already existing Items type structures. Extensions are strongly typed instances that cannot exist independently and must be attached to an Item or a Nested Element. Extensions are also intended to address “multi-typing” issues by enabling the overlap of type instances (e.g., a Document may be a “legal document” as well a “secure document”).