A Meta-Data Enhanced File System

Research has been done to enhance traditional file systems with database-like capabilities. Existing solutions store additional meta-data, describing files´ contents and interrelationships, but provide access to the new file system´s capabilities only through a specialized interface. Most of them don´t support user-defined relationships among files, and if they do, this is not true for file categories. We designed a file system that treats both files and file categories as similar elements and supports user-defined properties for them. We also developed an approach that gives the user access to the complete set of the database-like capabilities of our system, using the existing file system interface. We implemented on Linux a prototype of our system, in order to prove its functionality and test its performance.