noun the rightful duke of Milan in Shakespeare's The Tempest
A tool for organising Internet resources. Prospero allows each user to organise the contents of remote file servers into his own virtual file system with his own hierarchical name space consisting of links to remote objects. Remote indexing services are made available by treating the results as a virtual directory. A "union link" allows the contents of the link's target directory to appear as part of the directory containing the link. Arbitrary filters can be associated with links to modify the representation of the target directory as desired. Prospero directories can be shared between users. The Prospero protocol is used for communication between clients and servers in the archie system. A prototype of Prospero has been available since December 1990. It interfaces with Sun NFS, the Andrew File System and FTP (with local caching) and Archie. Support for web and WAIS is planned (1992).