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Semantic Mount Points

Let Remote be a remote file or query system. A semantic mount point s.Remote in a HAC file system Local connects queries within Local to results from Remote. Specifically, if the scope of a query within Local includes s.Remote, then it imports all the results asked within Remote with whatever query mechanism is used there. s.Remote provides an interface for content-based access to files in Remote. The power of a semantic mount point lies in the fact that the semantic directories created in it belong to the user's personal HAC file system, even though the symbolic links in these directories point to other (possibly remote) file systems. This allows users to create their own personal content-based classification of remote information. Furthermore, users can create physical files, semantic and syntactic directories, symbolic links, etc., as usual within semantic mount points. For instance, the physical files within a semantic mount point are indexed by HAC, and they can match queries of semantic directories created outside the subtree rooted at the mount point. This level of integration of name and content based access gives users a tremendous amount of power - they can extract exactly what they want and organize it in exactly the way they like. Previous semantic file systems, such as SFS or Nebula, do not allow such rich integration of query results and physical files, semantic directories and mount points like HAC.


next up previous
Next: Multiple Semantic Mount Points Up: Accessing Remote File and Previous: Accessing Remote File and
Burra Gopal
1999-01-04