Exploration of the online commons is relatively new. The original landscape of the World Wide Web was very spread out, and traversing it usually meant following links from page to page. At this stage, the only way to find works with public rights was to stumble across them. With the growth in search technology, the Internet became much more accessible, though it has surely grown to compensate. At this stage, it was possible to search for online commons, but only in the most rudimentary way – trying to guess which words were more likely to be found on pages with public rights, and then searching for them. Now, with the slow transition towards the Semantic Web, we are seeing an Internet that is even easier to traverse – where there are web pages that know something about themselves, something that can be communicated to search engines, and the landscape of the Internet can come to life.
