The purpose of this paper is to look at the recent growth of the Internet, and how it has greatly increased the amount of information that is accessible and the number of resources that are available to users. To exploit this growth, it must be possible for users to find the information and resources they need. Existing techniques for organizing systems have evolved from those used on centralized systems, but these techniques are inadequate for organizing information on a global scale.
The paper describes Prospero, a distributed file system based on the Virtual System Model. Prospero provides tools to help users organize Internet resources.
These tools allow users to construct customized views of available resources, while taking advantage of the structure imposed by others.
Prospero provides a framework that can tie together various indexing services, producing the fabric on which resource discovery techniques can be applied.
