GSoC: Semantic File System

[Robert Watson]

On Sat, 21 Mar 2009, Gabriele Modena wrote:

> I am an AI master student at the university of Amsterdam.
>
> On of my current research interests lays in the area of information 
> retrieval and I would like to do a project within my University research 
> group starting next june.
>
> I am actually studying background literature about semantic filesystem and 
> information retrieval over local files.
>
> Being also quite interested in kernel development, I would like to propose a 
> proof of concept that implements such techniques. My goal, though, would not 
> be just a reimplementation of existing code, but possibly some more 
> extensive work that combines techniques already used in other domains of II.
>
> Could this be an interesting Summer of Code proposal for the FreeBSD 
> Foundation?
>
> I plan to write down some notes/ideas (and details) I have on a wiki 
> starting from next week.

Hi Gabriele--

We are certainly not uninterested in projects along these lines, but I think 
the trick will be creating a convincing proposal that argues that (a) you can 
do the work in a summer, (b) there's a compelling usage case for including the 
results in FreeBSD, and (c) find a mentor who can supervise you in this 
project.  What sort of semantic file system do you have in mind?  How would 
you feel about a middle-ground project along the lines of Mac OS X Spotlight 
or similar efficient userspace indexing of a file system based on feedback 
from the file system about what has changed, or something BeOS-like, in which 
indexing takes place for extended attributes rather than for contents?

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge