how to annotate files - when long filenames are not enough

I work with many files doing general data analysis.

Things I want to know about my files include:

• what data is contained in the file (in long and very long descriptive, english text)?
• is the file downloaded from somewhere (where? when?) or generated by a program (which one?)
• why I made this file, verbal description what 开发者_高级运维I want to do with it, where it belongs in my data analysis workflow (additional english text description, can get very long as well)

For this, long filenames are simply not the solution! Even long filenames are too short for the full descriptions, and when actually working with the files (perl, awk, R) the long filenames get in the way.

What I do right now is make a readme in each dir with the filename, tab-separator, and the long description. However this solution is very cumbersome as you can imagine because the descriptions are completely separated from the filesystem and everything, the readme has to be maintained and updated separatedly etc.

Is there any tool one can use for really verbose, systematic descriptions of filenames? Maybe even integrated into the filesystem?

Operating system used: Windows 7 and Cygwin, various flavours of linux/unix through SSH and importing X