Files are Siles: Extending File Systems with Semantic Annotations

With the increasing storage capacity of personal computing devices, the problems of information overload and information fragmentation are apparent on users’ desktops. For the Web, semantic technologies solve this problem by adding a machine-interpretable information layer on top of existing resources. It has been shown that the application of these technologies to desktop environments is helpful for end users. However, certain characteristics of the Semantic Web architecture that are commonly accepted in the Web context are not desirable for desktops. To overcome these limitations, the authors propose the sile model, which combines characteristics of the Semantic Web and file systems. This model is a conceptual foundation for the Semantic Desktop and serves as underlying infrastructure on which applications and further services can be built. The authors present one service, a virtual file system based on siles, which allows users to semantically annotate files and directories and keeps full compatibility to traditional hierarchical file systems. The authors also discuss how Semantic Web vocabularies can be applied for meaningful annotation of files and present a prototypical implementation of the model and analyze the performance of typical access operations, both on the file system and metadata level.