Information Waste on the World Wide Web: combating the clutter

The internet has become a critical part of the infrastructure supporting modern life. The internet’s key success factor, the vast amount of web-accessible information, hinges on a high degree of openness and autonomy of information providers. However, this makes the web vulnerable to inaccurate, misleading, or outdated information. Now there is more information than ever, this unnecessary and unusable content, which is referred to as “information waste,” takes up hardware resources and clutters the web. In this paper, the phenomenon of information waste will be examined in more detail by developing a definition and analyzing its causes and effects. A theoretical framework based on semiotics is developed. Possible solutions will be explored and a classification approach using objective metrics for information waste detection is proposed. Supervisors: Fons Wijnhoven and Chintan Amrit