PosCFS: An advanced file management technique for the wearable computing environment

Abstract

In the ubiquitous computing environment, wearable computers are becoming more and more important because they provide an interface between human and computers. However, there are many challenges that come from its distributed, dynamic, heterogeneous computing environment. Most of all, an wearable computer has limited I/O devices for user interface. Thus, there are many context-aware applications to provide convenience for users. But each application should suffer from finding corresponding data. So, it is very important to support context-awareness in a file service for these applications through maintaining user's activities and metadata derived from them. In this paper, we present a context-aware file service suitable for the wearable computing environment to provide a convenient data sharing service among devices and users. To realize our work, we present an ontology based file metadata management scheme for context awareness. Finally, we implement the early prototype by using the UPnP [7] and WebDAV [8] technologies and define source ontology by OWL [9] and are still refining the system design. We believe that this work could be a predominant reference for a new generation of file management technology in the ubiquitous computing environment. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2006.