An extensible type system for wide-area information management

The advent of usable information access systems like the World-Wide Web has placed vast amounts of information within easy reach of users. However, the volume of information complicates information access and quickly overwhelms users. To overcome the complexity of wide-area information management, the next generation of information systems must facilitate applications to locate, retrieve and customize the information. This paper talks about the type management in the Synopsis File System, an experimental wide-area file system for information management. The type system supports dynamic type extension so that new file types can be integrated with existing file types