We present a new file system that combines name-based and content-based access to files at the same time. Our design allows both methods to be used at any time, thus preserving the benefits of both. Users can create their own name spaces based on queries, on explicit path names, or on any combination interleaved arbitrarily. All regular file operations -- such as adding, deleting, or moving files -- are supported in the same way, and in addition, query consistency is maintained and adapted to what the user is manually doing. One can add, remove, or move results of queries, and in general handle them as if they were regular files. This creates interesting new consistency problems, for which we suggest and implement solutions. Remote le systems or remote query systems (e.g., web search) can be integrated by users into their own coherent name spaces in a clean way. We believe that our design can serve as the basis for the future information-rich file systems, allowing users better handle on their information.

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Current directory-based hierarchical file systems have many limitations as the amount of unstructured data possessed by individual user is increasing continuously. One of the most significant problems is that users usually have difficulties searching, navigating, and organizing their files since useful semantic information describing a file is not used in the current directory-based system. To solve this problem, several research groups have suggested attribute-based file naming systems. However, their approaches have not been widely used because of lack of semantic information. In this paper, we describe the ontology-based semantic file naming approach that employs the hierarchical conceptual clustering technique to capture more complex semantic information from the set of file attributes. Ontologies, which play a major role on the Semantic Web, describe the semantics of data by organizing data into taxonomies of concepts and describing the relationships between concepts. To generate the ontology from the set of attribute-value pairs for files, we first extend one of the standard incremental hierarchical clustering techniques, COBWEB, and suggest the new clustering evaluation measure to guide search through the space of clustering. From the clustering result, we then generate the ontology and represent it by the RDF Schema. Our experimental results show that our extended clustering approach can produce a good quality of the concept hierarchy, and is computationally efficient and well suited to building the ontology-based semantic file system. 1

We present a new file system that combines name-based and content-based access to files at the same time. Our design allows both methods to be used at any time, thus preserving the benefits of both. Users can create their own name spaces based on queries, on explicit path names, or on any combination interleaved arbitrarily. All regular file opemtions- such as adding, deleting, or moving files- are supported in the same way, and in addition, query consistency is maintained and adapted to what the user is manually doing. One can add, remove, or moue results of queries, and in general handle them as if they were regular files. This creates interesting new consistency problems, for which we suggest and implement solutions. Remote file systems or remote query systems (e.g., web search) can be integmted by users into their own coherent name spaces in a clean way. We believe that our design can serve as the basis for the future information-rich file systems, allowing users better handle on their information. 1