Personal Metadata Service

People use a diversity of digital storage facilities, such as laptops, cell phone address books, handheld devices, desktop computers and web-based storage services. Unfortunately, as the number of such personal data repositories increases, so does the management problem of ensuring that the most up-to-date version of any document in a user's personal space is available to him/her on the storage facility he/she is currently using. The metadata service makes it easier to locate current versions of personal files and ensures their availability across different repositories. Roma-aware applications store information about each of a user's files, such as name, location, timestamp and keywords, on this centralized metadata service. Separating out these metadata from the data repositories makes it practical to keep the metadata store on a highly available, portable device. Description of the design requirements, architecture and current prototype implementation of Roma are provided.


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