Towards a Semantic, Deep Archival File System

We advocate the need for integrating semantic information into a file system. We demonstrate the benefits of this in Sedar, a deep archival file system. Sedar is the first archival file system that integrates semantic storage and retrieval capabilities. In addition, Sedar introduces several novel features: the notion of semantic-hashing to reduce the storage consumption that is robust against misalignment of documents; virtual snapshots of the namespace, and conceptual deletions of files and directories. Sedar exposes a semantic catalogue that allows other semanticbased tools (e.g., visualization and statistical analysis) to be built. It uses a decentralized P2P storage utility enabling horizontal scalability.