A Storage Ontology for Hierarchical Storage Management Systems

The increasing capacity of storage media could store a huge amount of data while the price per Gigabyte is decreasing. On the other hand users and companies produce much more information that still overruns the available storage capacities. As a consequence, the management and storage of this data is very complex and expensive. Users and apps want to access their files directly and without any time delay, resulting in using fast but very expensive storage media. A deeper look on the usage of data, especially in companies, shows that only a very small amount of it is used every day. Summarizing these facts, a concept is needed to find out which data is important to provide them on fastest storage media, and less important one on cheapest storage media. Concepts derived from the Semantic Desktop can be a solution. We introduce a concept to describe files by an ontology. This allows for the description of their relations to each other, as well as their attributes. The resulting ontology offers an extensive volume of data that helps to find the adequate storage conditions for every single file. Another great advantage that showed up, is the independence from file system accesses to gather information about the stored files.