A metadata-orientated integrated approach to personal file management

In recent years, as the computing and storage technology developed and became affordable, different types of systems including mobile devices such as smartphones become part of our daily life. Personal information is now scattered over different systems and devices in different forms and formats. We utilize the file-level abstraction and file metadata to formulate a solution to personal file management. Unlike the widely-used file synchronization and backup where active involvement of a user is essential, our approach relies on a light-weight client program which passively identifies a user activity during any login session in terms of atomic file-event such as file creation, copy, update, and deletion (along with the necessary file metadata). The client synchronizes such information with the server (essentially a metadata repository and optionally, a centralized file-storage). Our approach can easily be extended to support multiple users with emerging computing infrastructure such as the cloud computing in a serious commercial undertaking. In this paper, we will demonstrate our basic idea of metadata-orientated personal file management with a prototype implementation that can handle some simple but crucial personal file management issues (e.g., duplicate detection, version tracking and the like) along with the details of the underlying algorithms. We also elaborate our future plans to address more complex file management scenarios using the same framework.