[Alex Wright] on [Paul Otlet]. In 1934, years before Vannevar Bush dreamed of the MemEx, decades before Ted Nelson coined the term Hyper Text, [Paul Otlet] envisioned a new kind of scholar's workstation: a moving desk shaped like a wheel, powered by a network of hinged spokes beneath a series of moving surfaces. The machine would let users search, read and write their way through a vast mechanical database stored on millions of 3x5 index cards. This new research environment would do more than just let users retrieve documents; it would also let them annotate the relationships between one another, "the connections each (document) has with all other (documents), forming from them what might be called the [Universal Book]." (Intertwingular Ity) Taking the Dewey Decimal System as his starting point, Otlet began developing what came to be known as the [Universal Decimal Classification], now widely recognized as the first - and one of the only - full implementations of a faceted classification system... Otlet biographer [Boyd Rayward] describes the Traite as "perhaps the first systematic, modern discussion of general problems of organising information." With the faceted philosophy of the [UDC] as backdrop, the Traite posited a universal "law of organization" declaring that no document could be properly understood by itself, but that its meaning becomes clarified through its influence on other documents, and vice versa.

Update: Clay Shirky on the silliness of the [UDC], as repeated by YaHoo ontologists and the Semantic Web.

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