Prospero: a T Ool for Organizing Internet Resources Organizing, Not Just Searching

Recent growth of the Internet has greatly increased the amount of information that is accessible and the number of resources that are available to users. To exploit this growth, it must be p ossible for users to nd the information and resources they need. Existing techniques for organizing systems have evolved f r om those used o n c entralized systems, but these techniques a r e inadequate for organizing information on a global scale. This article describes Prospero, a distributed le system based on the Virtual System Model. Prospero p r ovides tools to help users organize Internet resources. These tools allow users to construct customized views of available resources, while taking advantage of the structure imposed by others. Prospero p r ovides a framework that can tie together various indexing services producing the fabric upon which resource discovery techniques can be applied. The Internet contains a massive amount of information , but it is hard to use that information. There are several barriers to usability: it is diicult to identify the information of interest; it is diicult to keep track of this information once found; it is diicult to share information about what is available, or to collabora-tively maintain such meta-information; and the information is often scattered across multiple le systems of diierent t ypes, meaning that diierent mechanisms are needed to access it. Existing methods for organizing information have e v olved from techniques used on centralized systems and are inadequate for organizing information on a global scale. Users look for information in many w ays. They consult libraries, journals, professional society publications , mailing lists, indexing services, and other users. While these sources of meta-information are useful, it is still necessary for users to identify the source that can answer their query. Prospero provides a framework Cliiord Neuman is a computer scientist at the Informa-The views and conclusions contained in this article are those of the author and should not be interpreted as representing the oocial policies, either expressed or implied, of any of the funding agencies. within which such meta-information which I will refer to as directories can be made available to users and it provides the tools to allow directories from multiple sources to be combined in useful ways. Prospero lets users create customized views of a global le system. This customization plays an important role in organizing information since there are many communities …