Perspective: Semantic data management for the home (CMU-PDL-08-105)

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. Acknowledgements: We thank the members and companies of the PDL Consortium (including APC, Cisco, EMC, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, LSI, Microsoft, Network Appliance, Oracle, Seagate, Symantec, and VMware) for their interest, insights, feedback, and support. This material is based on research sponsored in part by the National Science Foundation, via grant #CNS-0326453, and by the Army Research Office, under agreement number DAAD19–02–1–0389. Brandon Salmon is supported in part by an Intel Fellowship. Special thanks to Rob Reeder, for all his help in setting up the user study.