Ideally, the file system should provide an encapsulation that helps others find the calendar and, simultaneously, the operations that act on it. The Synopsis file system defines a logical uniform interface to files through an object-based extension to the traditional file system interface. In addition to the traditional untyped files, SynFS defines an interface to a typed synopsis. As the name indicates, a synopsis is an object that contains a summary of the file. A file system uses static directories to group similar files.
Path names serve to identify files.
To discover synopses, SynFS adds content-based addressing based on synopsis properties. Finally, for operational encapsulation, SynFS adds method invocation as a way of operating on a synopsis. SynFS leverages technology from the object and World-Wide Web communities to address two specific problems. First, to address the problem of adding structure and a well defined interface to data in files, we borrow the concept of encapsulation and typing from the object community. A synopsis is an object that contains data and a set of methods that operate on the data.