Searching and navigating petabyte-scale file systems based on facets

Abstract

As users interact with file systems of ever increasing size, it is becoming more difficult for them to familiarize themselves with the entire contents of the file system. In petabyte-scale systems, users must navigate a pool of billions of shared files in order to find the information they are looking for. One way to help alleviate this problem is to integrate navigation and search into a common framework. One such method is faceted search. This method originated within the information retrieval community, and has proved popular for navigating large repositories, such as those in e-commerce sites and digital libraries. This paper introduces faceted search and outlines several current research directions in adapting faceted search techniques to petabyte-scale file systems.