Towards Efficient Semantic Object Storage for the Home (CMU-PDL-06-103)

The home provides a new and challenging environment for data management. Devices in the home are extremely heterogeneous in terms of computational capability, capacity, and usage model. Yet, ideally, information would be shared easily across them. Current volume-based filesystems do not provide the flexibility to allow these specialized devices to keep an up-to-date copy of the information they require without seeing large amounts of traffic to other, unrelated pieces of information. We propose the use of views to allow devices to subscribe to particular classes of objects. Data views allow devices to see up-to-date information from available devices, and eventual consistency with unavailable devices, for objects of interest without seeing updates to other objects in the system. Views also provide a basis on which to build reliability, data management and search.