Access, claims and quality on the internet-Future challenges

The vision of access to human knowledge has existed explicitly at least since the time of Aristotle In 1934, Otlet outlined a vision of comprehensive access to knowledge. Progress towards this vision entailed initial visions of hypertext, markup languages, the semantic web, Wikipedia and more recently a series of developments with respect to Open Source. A brief survey of these developments is provided. The rhetoric of the Internet insists that everything should be accessible by everyone at anytime. This poses obvious technical challenges and serious philosophical problems of method. If everything is accessible then how do we separate the chaff from the grain and how do we identify quality? Following a survey of important developments, this essay suggests fi ve dimensions that need to be included in a future web: 1) variants and multiple claims; 2) levels of certainty in making a claim; 3) levels of authority in defending a claim; 4) levels of signifi cance in assessing a claim; 5) levels of thoroughness in dealing with a claim.