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Paul Otlet (b. August 23, 1868, Belgium - December 10, 1944) was the founding father of documentation, the field of study now more commonly referred to as information science. He created the Universal Decimal Classification, one of the most prominent examples of faceted classification. more...

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Otlet was responsible for the widespread adoption in Europe of the standard American 3x5 inch index card used until recently in most library catalogs around the world, though largely displaced by the advent of online public access catalogs (OPAC). Otlet wrote numerous essays on how to collect and organize the world’s knowledge, culminating in two books, the Traité de documentation (1934) and Monde: Essai d'universalisme (1935).

Otlet, along with his friend and colleague Henri La Fontaine, founded the now-bankrupt Institut International de Bibliographie in 1895 which later became in English the International Federation for Information and Documentation (FID). In 1910, following a huge international conference, they created the Union of International Associations, which is still located in Brussels. They also created a great international center called at first Palais Mondial (World Palace), later, the Mundaneum to house the collections and activities of their various organizations and institutes.

Otlet was also a tireless idealist and peace activist, pushing internationalist political ideas that were embodied in the League of Nations and its International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation (forerunner of UNESCO), working alongside his colleague Henri La Fontaine, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1913, to achieve their ideas of a new world polity that they saw arising from the global diffusion of information and the creation of new kinds of international organization.

Vision and Achievements

Paul Otlet devoted his professional life to the art of collecting, recording, organizing and disseminating knowledge. Although he lived decades before computers and networks emerged, what he discussed prefigured what ultimately became the World Wide Web. His vision of a great network of knowledge was centered on documents and included the notions of hyperlinks, search engines, remote access, and social networks—although these notions were described by different names.

Otlet not only imagined that all the world's knowledge should be interlinked and made available remotely to anyone (what he called an International Network for Universal Documentation), he also proceeded to build a structured document collection that involved standardized paper sheets and cards filed in custom-designed cabinets according to an ever-expanding ontology, an indexing staff which culled information worldwide from as diverse sources as possible, and a commercial information retrieval service which answered written requests by copying relevant information from index cards. Users of this service were even warned if their query was likely to produce more than 50 results per search.

Read more at Wikipedia.org