Owen Hoffmann: Linking File System

As the amount and variety of data stored on computers has grown, traditional file systems are having trouble keeping up with the organizational requirements imposed by large quantities of data with complex relationships. As a result, many application developers have been forced to develop their own metadata stores for tracking relationships between files. These specialized stores are both application-specific and add significant complexity during development. In addition, because relationships between files are not accessible except from specialized applications, the possibilities for searching and navigating the file system that might be offered by richer file relationships is lost. The World Wide Web serves well as an example of the value of relational metadata. Even with the limited data about relationships offered by hyperlinks in web pages, search engines such as Google can provide more relevant results from the billions of available web pages than a desktop search application is able to provide from a limited number of documents.

LiFS (the Linking FileSystem) aims to simplify metadata storage and management by adding rich relational metadata to that already offered by traditional file systems. Using LiFS, users and applications need only deal with creating metadata, rather than storing it. In addition, a common interface allows applications which might have in- depth knowledge about certain types of files to provide their rich metadata structures to any user of the operating system. LiFS introduces the relational link as a unit of file metadata. A relational link is a link between files with a <key,value> pair expressing their relationship. In LiFS, files and directories are not differentiated; directories appear as 0-byte files with a set of outgoing links.

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