Paul Otlet

Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet (/ɒtˈleɪ/; French: [pɔl maʁi ɡilɛ̃ ɔtlɛ]; 23 August 1868 – 10 December 1944) was a Belgian author, lawyer and peace activist; who was a foundational figure in documentalism, a precursory discipline to information science.

Otlet created the Universal Decimal Classification, which would later become a faceted classification. Otlet was responsible for the development of an early information retrieval tool, the "Repertoire Bibliographique Universel" (RBU). RBU was used by the International Institute of Bibliography which later became the Mundaneum. Otlet wrote numerous essays on how to collect and organize and connect knowledge, culminating in two books, the Traité de Documentation (1934) and Monde: Essai d'universalisme (1935). His ideas for information collection, storage and retrieval have been compared to early incarnations of the internet and search engines.

In 1907, following a huge international conference, Otlet and Henri La Fontaine created the Central Office of International Associations, which was renamed to the Union of International Associations in 1910, and 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 witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of information, resulting in the creation of new kinds of international organization.

Otlet also endorsed the internationalist politics of the League of Nations and its International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (the forerunner of UNESCO) along with fellow Mundaneum founder La Fontaine.