Paul Otlet

Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet (/ɒtˈleɪ/; French: [pɔl maʁi ɡilɛ̃ ɔtlɛ]; 23 August 1868 – 10 December 1944) was a Belgian bibliographer, lawyer, and peace activist, and a key figure in documentation science, a precursor 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.