In our view the most natural custodians are the learned societies since they have commitment to the community and experience over many years. They often act as archivists, moderators and accreditors. The next section looks at structured documents, their environment and steps of synthesis into knowledge. The knowledge environment of a document may involve many disciplines with considerable overlap. For a specialist, this interpretation is carried in their head with recourse to the traditional library where necessary.
Structured documents begin to enable the use of an information prosthetic.
It points to a definitive terminological entry that has further hyperlinks to related information and in this case, come from other authorities distributed globally. One approach towards the information prosthetic is to link documents through their citations. This is generally agreed to be valuable and most major publishers have active programs in the area of citations. It will be some time before this process stabilises as there are unsolved problems. For example, retrospective markup, charging mechanisms for access and hyperlinks between different publishers require resolution.