Searchable virtual file system: Toward an intelligent ubiquitous storage

Abstract

As moving toward ubiquitous environment, demand for a easy data-lookup is growing rapidly. In an ocean of the exploding data, users should use some tools to find an right data. Intelligent ubiquitous applications also make the data-lookup service essential to the ubiquitous computing framework. This paper proposes a new, searchable, backward-compatible, virtual file system (S-VFS) for a easy file-lookup. We add the lookup functionality to VFS, the de facto standard layer in the file system. Users don't need to remember a full path to find a file any longer. Instead, each file has the attributes to use at lookup. S-VFS maintains the attributes in a normal file per partition. The indexing structures for the attributes are placed on a separated partition. Using the attribute files and the indexing structures, S-VFS processes queries provided by users and returns the result as a form of directory. In spite of this modification in VFS, S-VFS uses the legacy file systems without any modification. Since S-VFS supports the full backward compatibility, users can even browse hierarchically with the legacy path name.