The contributed directly.

= 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, he anticipated and may have indirectly influenced the development of 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, social networks, and Folksonomy. (Obviously 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, he also proceeded to build a structured document collection on paper cards filed in custom-designed cabinets according to an ever-expanding ontology (computer science), 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. The respondents even warned users if their query was likely to produce more than 50 results.

The contents of Paul Otlet s Mundaneum or Permanent Encyclopedia grew from 400 000 entries in 1895 to over 15 million in 1934; a significant achievement for a paper-based, human-powered search engine. Although Otlet encouraged collaborative authorship like in Wikipedia, his collections still required centralized indexing according to the Universal Decimal Classification.

Paul Otlet also aimed to extract substance from books much like we strive to separate content from presentation on the Web, and then cross-link this substance with other contents and automatically provide enriched combinations in ways unforeseen by the original book authors. This vision is strikingly similar to Tim Berners-Lee s late-1990s concept of the Semantic Web.

= Oblivion and Rediscovery =

Abandoned by the Belgian government, suffering from mismanagement and finally bankrupted, the Mundaneum was dealt a final blow by German troops marching into Brussels. In the wake of World War II, Otlet s reputation plunged to obscurity and his contributions to the field were overshadowed by the rising popularity of American information scientists such as Vannevar Bush, Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson and later Seymour Lubetzky.

However, recent years have seen a renewed interest in Otlet s work. His 1934 masterpiece, the Traité de documentation , was reprinted in 1989 by the CLPCF in Belgium. In 1990, Professor W. Boyd Rayward published an English translation of some of Otlet s best writings.

Since 1998, the Mundaneum is the name of a museum in Mons (Belgium) housing the remains of various collections sponsored by Paul Otlet, as well as his personal archives.

= References =

= External Links =