The Roma Personal Metadata Service

People now have available to them a diversity of digital storage devices, including palmtops, cell phone address books, laptops, desktop computers and web-based services. Unfortunately, as the number of personal data repositories increases, so does the management problem of ensuring that the most up-to-date version of any document is available to the user on the storage device he is currently using. We introduce the Roma personal metadata service to make it easier to locate current file versions and ensure their availability across different repositories. This centralized service stores information about each of a user’s files, such as name, location, timestamp and keywords, on behalf of mobility-aware applications. Separating out these metadata from the data repositories makes it practical to keep the metadata store on a highly available, portable device. In this paper we describe the design requirements, architecture and current prototype implementation of Roma.