The Roma Personal Metadata Service

People now have available to them a diversity of digital storage facilities, including laptops, cell phone address books, handheld devices, desktop computers and web-based storage 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 in a user's personal file space is available to him on the storage facility he is currently using. We introduce the Roma personal metadata service to make it easier to locate current versions of personal files 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 respositories 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.