The Metalist Model: A Simple and Extensible Information Model for the Future Internet

摘要

In the scope of the Future Internet, where the network is moving from a node-centric to an information-centric organization, the way to specify the metadata associated to objects becomes crucial for scalability, performance and complexity reasons. This article presents an original information model, called the metalist model, that describes metadata in a simple, efficient and extensible way. The metadata can be provided in several ways: directly from the metalist description of the object itself, embedded into the metalist via an inclusion from another metalist and automatically translated from another metadata format. These features enable gathering metadata common to many objects into common metalists to simplify updates and synchronization and smooth harmonization with other existing object formats and descriptions.