Dessy: Towards Flexible Mobile Desktop Search

In the near future, mobile devices are expected to have a storage capacity comparable to today’s desktop machines. As the amount of infomation grows, conventional search tools become less effective. To meet these challenges, we turn to desktop search. This paper presents Dessy, aDESktop Search directorY system for mobile and desktop computers alike. It allows a user to find files by their content, metadata, and context information, provides an interface for locating files for both users and applications, and allows finding files with just their metadata available. Dessy supports separate synchronization of file metadata and data. Dessy is unique among desktop search software in that it clearly separates extraction, exchange, and querying of search metadata. In particular, metadata extraction may be performed on one device and querying on another, with only search metadata being exchanged between the devices. Dessy emphasizes extensibility: adding new indexed file types, metadata fields, and index storage methods is easy. Finding files is done with virtual directories, which are views into the user’s files, browseable by regular file managers.

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