Organizing and sharing distributed personal web-service data

  • Authors:

  • Roxana Geambasu;Cherie Cheung;Alexander Moshchuk;Steven D. Gribble;Henry M. Levy

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA;University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA;University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA;University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA;University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

The migration from desktop applications to Web-based services is scattering personal data across a myriad of Web sites, such as Google, Flickr, YouTube, and Amazon S3. This dispersal poses new challenges for users, making it more difficult for them to: (1) organize, search, and archive their data, much of which is now hosted by Web sites; (2) create heterogeneous, multi-Web-service object collections and share them in a protected way; and (3) manipulate their data with standard applications or scripts. In this paper, we show that a Web-service interface supporting standardized naming, protection, and object-access services can solve these problems and can greatly simplify the creation of a new generation of object-management services for the Web. We describe the implementation of Menagerie, a proof-of-concept prototype that provides these services for Web-based applications. At a high level, Menagerie creates an integrated file and object system from heterogeneous, personal Web-service objects dispersed across the Internet. We present several object-management applications we developed on Menagerie to show the practicality and benefits of our approach.