The aim of this page is to start giving a brief overview of related works, with a comparison when possible (or a reference to the place where data can be found).

Virtual File Systems

A Virtual File System (VFS) is “an abstraction layer on top of a more concrete file system. The purpose of a VFS is to allow client applications to access different types of concrete file systems in a uniform way. A VFS can, for example, be used to access local and network storage devices transparently without the client application noticing the difference.” In other words, it is a software interface allowing aaplications a transparent interaction with a concrete file system.

Virtual file systems are often based on a large archive file, and they simply provide ways to read and write on it. FSter is not a single-file virtual file system, and gives instead access to an existing hierarchy.

FSter implementation is based on Fuse a widely known and used Linux technology, similar libraries exist for other operating systems, e.g., Dokan for Windows.

File metadata and faceted access

The set of basic file metadata (stored and exposed) differs from system to system; in our case, what the interface is enriching a standard file system with is generic metadata, used to generate a file (and folder) hyerarchy dynamically. The mechanism is similar to what happens in pseudo file systems such as ProcFS is “a [pseudo file system (a file system dynamically generated at boot) used to access process information from the kernel.” What FSter aims at generating and exploiting are user-defined metadata: a similar effort (generating and exploiting) user files metadata has been done in the Nepomuk project and is now part of KDE development and Mandriva Linux in particular. Experimental implementation of faceted browsing have recently been made. Another example can be DBFS, shown below: