FARM: file annotation and retrieval on mobile devices

As the technology evolves, mobile phones and portable devices are equipped with advanced features like built-in cameras, audio/video recordings, and other applications. When a user starts utilizing such features and applications, usually a large number of files are generated, and as this number grows, it becomes a challenging task to find the requested files with limited user-interface capabilities. This article presents FARM, a framework for file annotation and retrieval on resource-limited mobile devices like mobile phones, PDAs, and other MIDP compliant devices. Once the annotation process is completed, user can easily retrieve the files on the device itself or on in a networked environment where a large number of mobile nodes are involved. The metadata for annotation is gathered from the underlying file system and stored locally, which gives this framework a two-fold gain. Firstly, this framework does not require any common repository and hence, does not require communication medium to store and retrieve metadata. Secondly, searches are performed in a distributed fashion when more than one device is searched. The proposed framework has been implemented with a full featured application, and experimental results show that files can be retrieved efficiently and accurately with annotated data.