Flexible Data Access System Using Application Level Semantics on the Wide Area Network

We have designed and developed MetaFa as the metadata management system on wide-area network. The MetaFa offers the data access method for desired data using the metadata. In this paper, we propose “personal view namespace file system” (PVN-FS) which is enable to flexible data access based on characteristics and semantics of data. The PVN-FS is enable to mount original namespace on user's file systems. It can incorporate the search results as the directories in the local file system. Users create a child directory in the PVN-FS. Then, the child directory succeeds to the attribute of parent directories. Directory constructed with the PVN-FS creates the child and then refines a result of retrieval on an intersection for the metadata between the parent and the child, so the PVN-FS offers the data access functionality. To evaluate an effectiveness of PVN-FS, we implemented a prototype system. Consequently, we mentioned and discussed about a possibility of PVN-FS that can be applied to the flexible data access method on the wide-area distributed computing environments.