615 PAPER 31 Semantic Files:

This paper describes semantic file systems--a file system that
provides flexible associative access to files by extracting attributes
from files with file transducers.  They introduce virtual
directories--which are queries to find other files and directories.
Properties of file system objects are automatically extracted and
indexed.  They claim that a semantic file systems are more effective
than traditional tree structured file systems in terms of information
sharing and command level programming(?).

A transducer is a filter that reads in a file and outputs the file's
entities and their corresponding attributes.  This is a slight
limitation of the file system, because for every file type a
transducer needs to be written--although there _might_ be a way to
have a generic transducer for uncommon file types (I guess the default
for most UNIX type things would be ok to be the text-transducer, but
in general this may be an annoyance).

Actually, I'm not quite sure why we read this paper.  I suppose this
file system may be extended to support dynamic, mobile networks...but
that is not really what it was designed for I think.

