ABSTRACT

Carnegie Mellon University Parallel Data Lab Technical Report CMU-PDL-08-105, May 2008.

Superceded by 7th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '09). Feb. 24-27, 2008. San Francisco, CA.

Perspective: Semantic Data Management for the Home

Brandon Salmon, Steven W. Schlosser*, Lorrie Faith Cranor, Gregory R. Ganger

* Intel Research Pittsburgh

Electrical and Computer Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/

Perspective uses a new semantic filesystem construct, the view, to simplify management of distributed storage in the home. A view is a semantic description of a set of files, specified as a a query on file attributes. In Perspective, users can identify and control the files stored on a given device by examining and modifying the views associated with it. This approach allows them to reason about what is where in the same way (semantic naming) as they navigate their digital content. Thus, in serving as their own administrators, users do not have to deal with a second data organization scheme (hierarchical naming) to perform replica management tasks, such as specifying redundancy to provide reliability and data partitioning to address device capacity exhaustion. A set of extensive user studies confirm the difficulties created by current approaches and the efficacy of view-based data management.

KEYWORDS: home storage, views, perspective, storage management, contextual analsysis, user studies

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