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102-582: Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet ( / ɒ t ˈ l eɪ / ; French: [pɔl maʁi ɡilɛ̃ ɔtlɛ] ; 23 August 1868 – 10 December 1944) was a Belgian author, entrepreneur, lawyer and peace activist; predicting the arrival of the internet before World War II, he is among those considered to be the father of information science , a field he called "documentation". Otlet created the Universal Decimal Classification , which would later become

204-401: A faceted classification . Otlet was responsible for the development of an early information retrieval tool, the " Repertoire Bibliographique Universel " (RBU) which utilized 3x5 inch index cards , used commonly in library catalogs around the world (now largely displaced by the advent of the online public access catalog (OPAC)). Otlet wrote numerous essays on how to collect and organize

306-638: A KR. Edmond Picard Edmond Picard (15 December 1836 – 19 February 1924) was a Belgian jurist and writer. He was a leading theoretician of antisemitism and racism in Belgium, as well as a champion of Belgian nationalism through his notions of the "Belgian soul" and Belgian martyrdom in World War I . He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times. He was lawyer at

408-523: A biography of Otlet (1975) that was translated into Russian (1976) and Spanish (1996, 1999, and 2005). In 1985, Belgian academic André Canonne raised the possibility of recreating the Mundaneum as an archive and museum devoted to Otlet and others associated with them; his idea initially was to house it in the Belgian city of Liège . Cannone, with substantial help from others, eventually managed to open

510-421: A book, " La Fin de la Guerre " ("The End of War") that defined a "World Charter of Human Rights" as the basis for an international federation. In 1910, Otlet and La Fontaine first envisioned a "city of knowledge", which Otlet originally named the " Palais Mondial " ("World Palace"), that would serve as a central repository for the world's information. In 1919, soon after the end of World War I, they convinced

612-447: A form of knowledge representation about the world or some part of it. The creation of domain ontologies is also essential to the definition and use of an enterprise architecture framework . Authors such as Ingwersen argue that informatology has problems defining its own boundaries with other disciplines. According to Popper "Information science operates busily on an ocean of commonsense practical applications, which increasingly involve

714-415: A global "information society". Otlet and Lafontaine established numerous organizations dedicated to standardization, bibliography, international associations, and consequently, international cooperation. These organizations were fundamental for ensuring international production in commerce, information, communication and modern economic development, and they later found their global form in such institutions as

816-599: 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 and La Fontaine were peace activists who endorsed the internationalist politics of the League of Nations and its International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (the forerunner of UNESCO ). Otlet and La Fontaine witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of information, resulting in

918-757: A halt due to the outbreak of World War I . Otlet returned to Belgium, but quickly fled after it became occupied by the Germans; he spent the majority of the war in Paris and various cities in Switzerland . Both his sons fought in the Belgian army, and one of them, Jean, died during the war in the Battle of the Yser . Otlet spent much of the war trying to bring about peace, and the creation of multinational institutions that he felt could avert future wars. In 1914, he published

1020-430: A query does not uniquely identify a single object in the collection. Instead, several objects may match the query, perhaps with different degrees of relevancy . An object is an entity that is represented by information in a database . User queries are matched against the database information. Depending on the application the data objects may be, for example, text documents, images, audio, mind maps or videos. Often

1122-535: A shared conceptualisation". An ontology renders shared vocabulary and taxonomy which models a domain with the definition of objects and/or concepts and their properties and relations. Ontologies are the structural frameworks for organizing information and are used in artificial intelligence , the Semantic Web , systems engineering , software engineering , biomedical informatics , library science , enterprise bookmarking , and information architecture as

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1224-636: A specific need. Often systems analysts work with one or more businesses to evaluate and implement organizational processes and techniques for accessing information in order to improve efficiency and productivity within the organization (s). An information professional is an individual who preserves, organizes, and disseminates information. Information professionals are skilled in the organization and retrieval of recorded knowledge. Traditionally, their work has been with print materials, but these skills are being increasingly used with electronic, visual, audio, and digital materials. Information professionals work in

1326-426: A step further and offers an independent social app that was downloaded by 19.5 million users in six months, proving how interested people are in the new way of being provided information. The connections and networks sustained through social media help information providers learn what is important to people. The connections people have throughout the world enable the exchange of information at an unprecedented rate. It

1428-454: A stifling environment. Otlet, as a child, had few friends, and played regularly only with his younger brother Maurice. He soon developed a love of reading and books. At the age of six, a temporary decline in his father's wealth caused the family to move to Paris . At the age of 11, Paul went to school for the first time, a Jesuit school in Paris, where he stayed for the next three years. The family then returned to Brussels, and Paul studied at

1530-775: A town in Massachusetts with a collection of books that the town voted to make available to all free of charge, forming the first public library of the United States . Academie de Chirurgia ( Paris ) published Memoires pour les Chirurgiens , generally considered to be the first medical journal , in 1736. The American Philosophical Society , patterned on the Royal Society ( London ), was founded in Philadelphia in 1743. As numerous other scientific journals and societies were founded, Alois Senefelder developed

1632-521: A utopian city dedicated to international institutions was largely inspired by the contemporary publication in 1913 by the Norwegian-American sculptor Hendrik Christian Andersen and the French architect Ernest Hébrard of an impressive series of Beaux-Arts plans for a World Centre of Communication (1913). For the design of his World City, Otlet collaborated with several architects. In this way

1734-506: A variety of public, private, non-profit, and academic institutions. Information professionals can also be found within organisational and industrial contexts. Performing roles that include system design and development and system analysis. Information science, in studying the collection, classification , manipulation, storage, retrieval and dissemination of information has origins in the common stock of human knowledge. Information analysis has been carried out by scholars at least as early as

1836-894: A whole series of designs for the World City was developed. The most elaborated plans were: the design of a Mundaneum (1928) and a World City (1929) by Le Corbusier in Geneva next to the palace of the League of Nations, by Victor Bourgeois in Tervuren (1931) next to the Congo Museum, again by Le Corbusier (in collaboration with Huib Hoste ) on the left bank in Antwerp (1933), by Maurice Heymans in Chesapeake Bay near Washington (1935), and by Stanislas Jassinski and Raphaël Delville on

1938-402: Is a model for describing the world that consists of a set of types, properties, and relationship types. Exactly what is provided around these varies, but they are the essentials of an ontology. There is also generally an expectation that there be a close resemblance between the real world and the features of the model in an ontology. In theory, an ontology is a "formal, explicit specification of

2040-521: Is an "increasingly mobile and social world [that] demands...new types of information skills". Social media integration as an access point is a very useful and mutually beneficial tool for users and providers. All major news providers have visibility and an access point through networks such as Facebook and Twitter maximizing their breadth of audience. Through social media people are directed to, or provided with, information by people they know. The ability to "share, like, and comment on...content" increases

2142-431: Is an area of research at the intersection of Informatics , Information Science, Information Security , Language Technology , and Computer Science . The objectives of information access research are to automate the processing of large and unwieldy amounts of information and to simplify users' access to it. What about assigning privileges and restricting access to unauthorized users? The extent of access should be defined in

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2244-498: Is associated with informatics, computer science , data science , psychology , technology , documentation science , library science , healthcare , and intelligence agencies . However, information science also incorporates aspects of diverse fields such as archival science , cognitive science , commerce , law , linguistics , museology , management , mathematics , philosophy , public policy , and social sciences . Information science focuses on understanding problems from

2346-555: Is for this reason that these networks have been realized for the potential they provide. "Most news media monitor Twitter for breaking news", as well as news anchors frequently request the audience to tweet pictures of events. The users and viewers of the shared information have earned "opinion-making and agenda-setting power" This channel has been recognized for the usefulness of providing targeted information based on public demand. The following areas are some of those that information science investigates and develops. Information access

2448-556: Is the art and science of organizing and labelling websites , intranets , online communities and software to support usability. It is an emerging discipline and community of practice focused on bringing together principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape . Typically it involves a model or concept of information which is used and applied to activities that require explicit details of complex information systems . These activities include library systems and database development. Information management (IM)

2550-409: Is the collection and management of information from one or more sources and the distribution of that information to one or more audiences. This sometimes involves those who have a stake in, or a right to that information. Management means the organization of and control over the structure, processing and delivery of information. Throughout the 1970s this was largely limited to files, file maintenance, and

2652-521: Is to gain competitive advantage internationally, through using IT in a creative and productive way. The knowledge economy is its economic counterpart, whereby wealth is created through the economic exploitation of understanding. People who have the means to partake in this form of society are sometimes called digital citizens . Basically, an information society is the means of getting information from one place to another ( Wark 1997 , p. 22). As technology has become more advanced over time so too has

2754-514: Is used to supply formal semantics of how reasoning functions should be applied to the symbols in the KR system. Logic is also used to define how operators can process and reshape the knowledge. Examples of operators and operations include, negation, conjunction, adverbs, adjectives, quantifiers and modal operators. The logic is interpretation theory. These elements—symbols, operators, and interpretation theory—are what give sequences of symbols meaning within

2856-492: The BBC Archives . In 1906, with his father Édouard near death and his businesses falling apart, Paul and his brother and five step-siblings formed a company, Otlet Frères ("Otlet Brothers") to try to manage these businesses, which included mines and railways. Paul, though he was consumed with his bibliographic work, became president of the company. In 1907, Édouard died, and the family struggled to maintain all parts of

2958-767: The Belgian Congo by drawing together "all the ne’er-do-wells of the various tribes of the Colony, aside from some hundreds of labourers". The Palais Mondial was briefly shuttered in 1922, due to lack of support from the government of Prime Minister Georges Theunis , but was reopened after lobbying from Otlet and La Fontaine. Otlet renamed the Palais Mondial to the Mundaneum in 1924. The RBU steadily grew to 13 million index cards in 1927; by its final year, 1934, it had reached more than 15 million. Index cards were stored in custom-designed cabinets, and indexed according to

3060-566: The Concilium Bibliographicum for Zoology, and completed this initial publication in 1907. The system defines not only detailed subject classifications, but also an algebraic notation for referring to the intersection of several subjects; for example, the notation "31:[622+669](485)" refers to the statistics of mining and metallurgy in Sweden . The UDC is an example of an analytico-synthetic classification, i.e., it permits

3162-706: The Index to Periodical Literature, the first general periodical literature index in the US. In 1854 George Boole published An Investigation into Laws of Thought..., which lays the foundations for Boolean algebra , which is later used in information retrieval . In 1860 a congress was held at Karlsruhe Technische Hochschule to discuss the feasibility of establishing a systematic and rational nomenclature for chemistry. The congress did not reach any conclusive results, but several key participants returned home with Stanislao Cannizzaro 's outline (1858), which ultimately convinces them of

Paul Otlet - Misplaced Pages Continue

3264-632: The League of Nations and the United Nations . Otlet designed the Universal Decimal Classification , based on Melville Dewey 's decimal classification system. 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 focused on documents and included the notions of hyperlinks , search engines , remote access, and social networks . Otlet not only imagined that all

3366-519: The World Wide Web . Automated information retrieval systems are used to reduce what has been called " information overload ". Many universities and public libraries use IR systems to provide access to books, journals and other documents. Web search engines are the most visible IR applications . An information retrieval process begins when a user enters a query into the system. Queries are formal statements of information needs , for example search strings in web search engines. In information retrieval

3468-650: The court of appeal and the Court of Cassation of Belgium . He was also head of the Belgian bar association , professor of law, playwright and journalist. Involved in politics, he was senator for the Belgian Labour Party . He also was a patron of the arts. The Symbolist poet Émile Verhaeren frequented Picard's literary salon and worked as a law intern at Picard's office between 1881 and 1884 before abandoning his legal career in favour of writing; Verhaeren too went on to receive multiple nominations for

3570-473: The scientific method , an objective view of the world can be gained. According to W. Boyd Rayward, his ideas placed him culturally and intellectually in the Belle Époque period of pre–World War I Europe, a period of great "cultural certitude". Otlet's writings have sometimes been called prescient of the current World Wide Web . His vision of a great network of knowledge was centered on documents and included

3672-432: The Mundaneum as best as they could, and there it remained until it was forced to move again in 1972, well after Otlet's death. The World City or Cité Mondiale is a utopian vision by Paul Otlet of a city which like a universal exhibition brings together all the leading institutions of the world. The World City would radiate knowledge to the rest of the world and construct peace and universal cooperation. Otlet’s idea to design

3774-460: The Nobel Prize in Literature. Picard propagated virulent racism and antisemitism in his works, such as Synthèse de l’antisémitisme (1892, reprinted 1942) and En Congolie (1896). He interpreted human society and its conflicts through the prism of race, claiming that Jews are "parasitic" and that Black people are "imitators like the apes". On account of his extremism he has been compared with

3876-540: The Universal Decimal Classification. The collection also grew to include files (including letters, reports, newspaper articles, etc.) and images, contained in separate rooms; the index cards were meant to catalog all of these as well. The Mundaneum eventually contained 100,000 files and millions of images. In 1934, the Belgian government again cut off funding for the project, and the offices were closed. (Otlet protested by keeping vigil outside

3978-508: The academic information subject specialist/librarian have, in general, similar subject background training, but the academic position holder will be required to hold a second advanced degree (MLS/MI/MA in IS, e.g.) in information and library studies in addition to a subject master's. The title also applies to an individual carrying out research in information science. A systems analyst works on creating, designing, and improving information systems for

4080-512: The business. In April 1908, Paul Otlet and his wife began divorce proceedings. Otlet remarried in 1912, to Cato Van Nederhesselt. In 1913, La Fontaine won the Nobel Peace Prize , and invested his winnings into Otlet and La Fontaine's bibliographic ventures, which were suffering from lack of funding. Otlet journeyed to the United States in early 1914 to try to get additional funding from the U.S. Government, but his efforts soon came to

4182-538: The computer ... and on commonsense views of language, of communication, of knowledge and Information, computer science is in little better state". Other authors, such as Furner, deny that information science is a true science. An information scientist is an individual, usually with a relevant subject degree or high level of subject knowledge, who provides focused information to scientific and technical research staff in industry or to subject faculty and students in academia. The industry *information specialist/scientist* and

Paul Otlet - Misplaced Pages Continue

4284-506: The concept of lithography for use in mass printing work in Germany in 1796. By the 19th century the first signs of information science emerged as separate and distinct from other sciences and social sciences but in conjunction with communication and computation. In 1801, Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a punched card system to control operations of the cloth weaving loom in France. It was

4386-420: The concept of information-gathering that "provides a broader perspective that adheres better to professionals' work-related reality and desired skills." ( Solomon & Bronstein 2021 ). An information society is a society where the creation, distribution, diffusion, uses, integration and manipulation of information is a significant economic, political, and cultural activity. The aim of an information society

4488-458: The creation of new kinds of international organization. They saw in this organization an emerging global polity , and wished to help solidify it. La Fontaine won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1913. Otlet was born in Brussels , Belgium on 23 August 1868, the oldest child of Édouard Otlet (Brussels 13 June 1842- Blanquefort , France , 20 October 1907) and Maria (née Van Mons). His father, Édouard,

4590-457: The definition of dissemination. The nature of social networks allows for faster diffusion of information than through organizational sources. The internet has changed the way we view, use, create, and store information; now it is time to re-evaluate the way we share and spread it. Social media networks provide an open information environment for the mass of people who have limited time or access to traditional outlets of information diffusion, this

4692-576: The development of both the League of Nations and the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, which was later merged into UNESCO . At several occasions, Otlet published racist statements dressed up as scientific facts, starting at the beginning of his career with L'Afrique Aux Noirs (1888) where he argued that white people or 'westernized' blacks were to be tasked with 'civilising' Africa. Similarly, in Monde (1935), near

4794-474: The development of the Internet and World Wide Web. Dissemination has historically been interpreted as unilateral communication of information. With the advent of the internet , and the explosion in popularity of online communities , social media has changed the information landscape in many respects, and creates both new modes of communication and new types of information", changing the interpretation of

4896-459: The documents themselves are not kept or stored directly in the IR system, but are instead represented in the system by document surrogates or metadata. Most IR systems compute a numeric score on how well each object in the database match the query, and rank the objects according to this value. The top ranking objects are then shown to the user. The process may then be iterated if the user wishes to refine

4998-686: The early 1990s, new interest arose in Otlet's speculations and theories about the organization of knowledge, the use of information technologies, and globalization. His 1934 masterpiece, the Traité de documentation , was reprinted in 1989 by the Centre de Lecture publique de la Communauté française in Belgium. (Neither the Traité nor its companion work, "Monde" (World) has been translated into English so far.) In 1990 Professor W. Boyd Rayward published an English translation of some of Otlet's writings. He also published

5100-425: The elaboration and application of information-theoretic and computational methodologies to its philosophical problems. In science and information science, an ontology formally represents knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain , and the relationships between those concepts. It can be used to reason about the entities within that domain and may be used to describe the domain. More specifically, an ontology

5202-455: The emergence of numerous special interest groups to respond to the changes. By the end of the decade, special interest groups were available involving non-print media, social sciences, energy and the environment, and community information systems. Today, information science largely examines technical bases, social consequences, and theoretical understanding of online databases, widespread use of databases in government, industry, and education, and

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5304-565: The end of his life, he claimed the biological superiority of white people. His interest in advancing 'The African Issue' was fuelled by a firm conviction of the superiority of European culture and intelligence which fitted the Enlightenment project that he was dedicated to. Otlet’s organisational support to the 1921 Pan-African Congress at the Palais Mondial (later: Mundaneum ) therefore needs to be considered in connection with

5406-713: The fathers of information science with the founding of the International Institute of Bibliography (IIB) in 1895. A second generation of European Documentalists emerged after the Second World War , most notably Suzanne Briet . However, "information science" as a term is not popularly used in academia until sometime in the latter part of the 20th century. Documentalists emphasized the utilitarian integration of technology and technique toward specific social goals. According to Ronald Day, "As an organized system of techniques and technologies, documentation

5508-657: The first scientific journal, in 1665 by the Royal Society (London). The institutionalization of science occurred throughout the 18th century. In 1731, Benjamin Franklin established the Library Company of Philadelphia , the first library owned by a group of public citizens, which quickly expanded beyond the realm of books and became a center of scientific experimentation , and which hosted public exhibitions of scientific experiments. Benjamin Franklin invested

5610-409: The first use of "memory storage of patterns" system. As chemistry journals emerged throughout the 1820s and 1830s, Charles Babbage developed his "difference engine", the first step towards the modern computer, in 1822 and his "analytical engine" by 1834. By 1843 Richard Hoe developed the rotary press, and in 1844 Samuel Morse sent the first public telegraph message. By 1848 William F. Poole begins

5712-472: The government of Belgium to give them the space and funding for this project, arguing that it would help Belgium bolster its bid to house the League of Nations headquarters. They were given space in the left wing of the Palais du Cinquantenaire , a government building in Brussels . They then hired staff to help add to their Universal Bibliographic Repertory. In 1921 Otlet wrote to W. E. B. Du Bois offering

5814-623: The individuals who had distinct opportunities to facilitate interdisciplinary activity targeted at scientific communication was Foster E. Mohrhardt , director of the National Agricultural Library from 1954 to 1968. By the 1980s, large databases, such as Grateful Med at the National Library of Medicine , and user-oriented services such as Dialog and Compuserve , were for the first time accessible by individuals from their personal computers. The 1980s also saw

5916-550: The information-seeking behaviors of librarians, academics, medical professionals, engineers and lawyers (among others). Much of this research has drawn on the work done by Leckie, Pettigrew (now Fisher) and Sylvain, who in 1996 conducted an extensive review of the LIS literature (as well as the literature of other academic fields) on professionals' information seeking. The authors proposed an analytic model of professionals' information seeking behaviour, intended to be generalizable across

6018-545: The left bank in Antwerp (1941). In these different designs the program of the World City stayed more or less fixed, containing a World Museum, a World University, a World Library and Documentation Centre, Offices for the International Associations, Offices or Embassies for the Nations, an Olympic Centre, a residential area, and a park. Otlet integrated new media, as they were invented, into his vision of

6120-514: The level of clearance granted for the information. Applicable technologies include information retrieval , text mining , text editing , machine translation , and text categorisation . In discussion, information access is often defined as concerning the insurance of free and closed or public access to information and is brought up in discussions on copyright , patent law , and public domain . Public libraries need resources to provide knowledge of information assurance. Information architecture (IA)

6222-547: The library issues Index Catalogue, which achieved an international reputation as the most complete catalog of medical literature. The discipline of documentation science , which marks the earliest theoretical foundations of modern information science, emerged in the late part of the 19th century in Europe together with several more scientific indexes whose purpose was to organize scholarly literature. Many information science historians cite Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine as

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6324-496: The life cycle management of paper-based files, other media and records. With the proliferation of information technology starting in the 1970s, the job of information management took on a new light and also began to include the field of data maintenance. Information retrieval (IR) is the area of study concerned with searching for documents, for information within documents, and for metadata about documents, as well as that of searching structured storage , relational databases , and

6426-517: The linking of one concept to another. Although some have described it as faceted, it is not, though there are some faceted elements in it. A truly faceted classification consists solely of simple concepts; there are many compound concepts listed in the UDC. It is still used by many libraries and bibliographic services outside the English-speaking world, and in some non-traditional contexts such as

6528-510: The locked offices, but to no avail.) The collection remained untouched within those offices, however, until 1940, when Germany invaded Belgium. Requisitioning the Mundaneum's quarters to hold a collection of Third Reich art and destroying substantial amounts of its collections in the process, the Germans forced Otlet and his colleagues to find a new home for the Mundaneum. In a large but decrepit building in Leopold Park they reconstituted

6630-533: The manipulations of classification and continuous interfiling." In addition would be needed "a very detailed synoptic outline of knowledge" that could allow classification of all of these chunks of data. In 1891, Otlet met Henri La Fontaine , a fellow lawyer with shared interests in bibliography and international relations, and the two became good friends. They were commissioned in 1892 by Belgium's Societé des Sciences sociales et politiques (Society of social and political sciences) to create bibliographies for various of

6732-486: The master copy. At various times between 1900 and 1914, attempts were made to send full copies of the RBU to cities such as Paris, Washington, D.C. and Rio de Janeiro ; however, difficulties in copying and transportation meant that no city received more than a few hundred thousand cards. In 1904, Otlet and La Fontaine began to publish their classification scheme, which they termed the Universal Decimal Classification . The UDC

6834-704: The material resources available and the creativity of its developers. It must therefore be regarded as an autonomous system controlling and ultimately permeating all other subsystems of society." Many universities have entire colleges, departments or schools devoted to the study of information science, while numerous information-science scholars work in disciplines such as communication , healthcare , computer science , law , and sociology . Several institutions have formed an I-School Caucus (see List of I-Schools ), but numerous others besides these also have comprehensive information foci. Within information science, current issues as of 2013 include: The first known usage of

6936-508: The mid-1960s. The Mikhailov school saw informatics as a discipline related to the study of scientific information. Informatics is difficult to precisely define because of the rapidly evolving and interdisciplinary nature of the field. Definitions reliant on the nature of the tools used for deriving meaningful information from data are emerging in Informatics academic programs. Regional differences and international terminology complicate

7038-504: The networked knowledge-base of the future. In the early 1900s, Otlet worked with engineer Robert Goldschmidt on storing bibliographic data on microfilm (then known as "micro-photography"). These experiments continued into the 1920s, and by the late 1920s he attempted along with colleagues to create an encyclopedia printed entirely on microfilm, known as the Encyclopaedia Microphotica Mundaneum , which

7140-500: The new Mundaneum in Mons , Belgium in 1998. This museum is still in operation, and contains the personal papers of Otlet and La Fontaine and the archives of the various organizations they created along with other collections important to the modern history of Belgium. Otlet scholar W. Boyd Rayward has written that Otlet's thinking is a product of the 19th century and the philosophy of positivism , which holds that, through careful study and

7242-557: The notions of hyperlinks , search engines , remote access, and social networks —although these notions were described by different names. In 1934, Otlet laid out this vision of the computer and internet in what he called "Radiated Library" vision. Paul Otlet's grave is located in the Etterbeek Cemetery, in Wezembeek-Oppem , Flemish Brabant, Belgium. Information science Historically, information science

7344-477: The other hand, provided a bibliometric investigation describing the relation between two different fields: "information science" and "information systems". Philosophy of information studies conceptual issues arising at the intersection of psychology , computer science , information technology , and philosophy . It includes the investigation of the conceptual nature and basic principles of information , including its dynamics, utilisation and sciences, as well as

7446-426: The perspective of the stakeholders involved and then applying information and other technologies as needed. In other words, it tackles systemic problems first rather than individual pieces of technology within that system. In this respect, one can see information science as a response to technological determinism , the belief that technology "develops by its own laws, that it realizes its own potential, limited only by

7548-595: The prestigious Collège Saint-Michel in Brussels. In 1894, his father became a senator in the Belgian Senate for the Catholic Party (until 1900). His father remarried to Valerie Linden, daughter of famed botanist Jean Jules Linden ; the two eventually had five additional children. The family travelled often during this time, going on holidays and business trips to Italy , France and Russia . Otlet

7650-538: The problem. Some people note that much of what is called "Informatics" today was once called "Information Science" – at least in fields such as Medical Informatics . For example, when library scientists began also to use the phrase "Information Science" to refer to their work, the term "informatics" emerged: Another term discussed as a synonym for "information studies" is " information systems ". Brian Campbell Vickery 's Information Systems (1973) placed information systems within IS. Ellis, Allen & Wilson (1999) , on

7752-404: The professions, thus providing a platform for future research in the area. The model was intended to "prompt new insights... and give rise to more refined and applicable theories of information seeking" ( Leckie, Pettigrew & Sylvain 1996 , p. 188). The model has been adapted by Wilkinson (2001) who proposes a model of the information seeking of lawyers. Recent studies in this topic address

7854-420: The query. Information seeking is the process or activity of attempting to obtain information in both human and technological contexts. Information seeking is related to, but different from, information retrieval (IR). Much library and information science (LIS) research has focused on the information-seeking practices of practitioners within various fields of professional work. Studies have been carried out into

7956-567: The racist statements that he published both before and after the event. In 1933, Otlet proposed building in Belgium near Antwerp a "gigantic neutral World City " to employ a massive number of workers, in order to alleviate the unemployment generated by the Great Depression . Otlet died in 1944, not long before the end of World War II, having seen his major project, the Mundaneum, shuttered, and having lost all his funding sources. According to Otlet scholar W. Boyd Rayward : And: In

8058-666: The reach farther and wider than traditional methods. People like to interact with information, they enjoy including the people they know in their circle of knowledge. Sharing through social media has become so influential that publishers must "play nice" if they desire to succeed. Although, it is often mutually beneficial for publishers and Facebook to "share, promote and uncover new content" to improve both user base experiences. The impact of popular opinion can spread in unimaginable ways. Social media allows interaction through simple to learn and access tools; The Wall Street Journal offers an app through Facebook, and The Washington Post goes

8160-423: The requesters copies of the relevant index cards for each query; scholar Charles van den Heuvel has referred to the service as an "analog search engine ". By 1912, this service responded to over 1,500 queries a year. Users of this service were even warned if their query was likely to produce more than 50 results per search. Otlet envisioned a copy of the RBU in each major city around the world, with Brussels holding

8262-452: The so-called Hotel Otlet . In 1895, Otlet and La Fontaine also began the creation of a collection of index cards, meant to catalog facts, that came to be known as the " Repertoire Bibliographique Universel " (RBU), or the "Universal Bibliographic Repertory". By the end of 1895 it had grown to 400,000 entries; later it would reach more than 15 million entries. In 1896, Otlet set up a fee-based service to answer questions by mail, by sending

8364-520: The social sciences; they spent three years doing this. In 1895, they discovered the Dewey Decimal Classification , a library classification system that had been invented in 1876. They decided to try to expand this system to cover the classification of facts that Otlet had previously imagined. They wrote to the system's creator, Melvil Dewey , asking for permission to modify his system in this way; he agreed, so long as their system

8466-448: The subject was the essay "Something about bibliography", written in 1892. In it he expressed the belief that books were an inadequate way to store information, because the arrangement of facts contained within them was an arbitrary decision on the part of the author, making individual facts difficult to locate. A better storage system, Otlet wrote in his essay, would be cards containing individual "chunks" of information, that would allow "all

8568-587: The term "information science" was in 1955. An early definition of Information science (going back to 1968, the year when the American Documentation Institute renamed itself as the American Society for Information Science and Technology ) states: Some authors use informatics as a synonym for information science . This is especially true when related to the concept developed by A. I. Mikhailov and other Soviet authors in

8670-680: The tides, and by 1875 Frank Stephen Baldwin was granted the first US patent for a practical calculating machine that performs four arithmetic functions. Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison invented the telephone and phonograph in 1876 and 1877 respectively, and the American Library Association was founded in Philadelphia. In 1879 Index Medicus was first issued by the Library of the Surgeon General, U.S. Army, with John Shaw Billings as librarian, and later

8772-493: The time of the Assyrian Empire with the emergence of cultural depositories, what is today known as libraries and archives. Institutionally, information science emerged in the 19th century along with many other social science disciplines. As a science, however, it finds its institutional roots in the history of science , beginning with publication of the first issues of Philosophical Transactions , generally considered

8874-424: The underlying knowledge model or knowledge base system (KBS) such as a semantic network . Knowledge Representation (KR) research involves analysis of how to reason accurately and effectively and how best to use a set of symbols to represent a set of facts within a knowledge domain. A symbol vocabulary and a system of logic are combined to enable inferences about elements in the KR to create new KR sentences. Logic

8976-681: The use of the Palais Mondial for the 2nd Pan-African Congress . Although both Otlet and Fontaine offered a warm welcome to the Congress, these sentiments were not shared across all of Belgian society. The Brussels-based paper Neptune stated that the organisers – particularly the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People were funded by the Bolsheviks – and raised concern that it might lead to difficulties in

9078-682: The validity of his scheme for calculating atomic weights. By 1865, the Smithsonian Institution began a catalog of current scientific papers, which became the International Catalogue of Scientific Papers in 1902. The following year the Royal Society began publication of its Catalogue of Papers in London. In 1868, Christopher Sholes, Carlos Glidden, and S. W. Soule produced the first practical typewriter . By 1872 Lord Kelvin devised an analogue computer to predict

9180-524: The variety of information science interests. By the 1960s and 70s, there was a move from batch processing to online modes, from mainframe to mini and microcomputers. Additionally, traditional boundaries among disciplines began to fade and many information science scholars joined with other programs. They further made themselves multidisciplinary by incorporating disciplines in the sciences, humanities and social sciences, as well as other professional programs, such as law and medicine in their curriculum. Among

9282-399: The wake of World War II , the contributions of Otlet to the field of information science were lost sight of in the rising popularity of the ideas of American information scientists such as Vannevar Bush , Douglas Engelbart , Ted Nelson and by such theorists of information organization as Seymour Lubetzky . Beginning in the 1980s, and especially after the advent of the World Wide Web in

9384-614: The way we have adapted in sharing this information with each other. Information society theory discusses the role of information and information technology in society, the question of which key concepts should be used for characterizing contemporary society, and how to define such concepts. It has become a specific branch of contemporary sociology. Knowledge representation (KR) is an area of artificial intelligence research aimed at representing knowledge in symbols to facilitate inferencing from those knowledge elements, creating new elements of knowledge. The KR can be made to be independent of

9486-519: The world's knowledge should be interlinked and made available remotely to anyone, but he also proceeded to build a structured document collection. This collection involved standardized paper sheets and cards filed in custom-designed cabinets according to a hierarchical index (which culled information worldwide from diverse sources) 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

9588-576: The world's knowledge, culminating in two books, the Traité de Documentation (1934) and Monde: Essai d'universalisme (1935). 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

9690-583: Was a firm believer in international cooperation to promote both the spread of knowledge and peace between nations. A self-identified liberal, universalist and pacifist, his endeavor to catalog and classify is an expression of the commitment to the Eurocentric project to structure knowledge according to universal categories and taxonomies, of which the Universal Decimal Classification is an example. The Union of International Associations, which he had founded in 1907 with Henri La Fontaine, later participated to

9792-547: Was a wealthy businessman who made his fortune selling trams around the world. His mother died in 1871 at the age of 24, when Otlet was three. Through his mother, he was related to the Van Mons family, a prosperous family, and to the Verhaeren family, of which Emile Verhaeren was one of the most important Belgian poets. His father kept him out of school, hiring tutors instead, until he was 11, believing that classrooms were

9894-564: Was educated at the Catholic University of Leuven and at the Free University of Brussels , where he earned a law degree on 15 July 1890. He married his step-cousin, Fernande Gloner, soon afterward, on 9 December 1890. He then clerked with famed lawyer Edmond Picard , a friend of his father's. Otlet soon became dissatisfied with his legal career, and began to take an interest in bibliography . His first published work on

9996-538: Was housed in the Mundaneum. In the 1920s and 1930s, he wrote about radio and television as other forms of conveying information, writing in the 1934 Traité de documentation that "one after another, marvellous inventions have immensely extended the possibilities of documentation." In the same book, he predicted that media that would convey feel, taste and smell would also eventually be invented, and that an ideal information-conveyance system should be able to handle all of what he called "sense-perception documents". Otlet

10098-557: Was likely to produce more than 50 results per search. By 1937 documentation had formally been institutionalized, as evidenced by the founding of the American Documentation Institute (ADI), later called the American Society for Information Science and Technology . With the 1950s came increasing awareness of the potential of automatic devices for literature searching and information storage and retrieval. As these concepts grew in magnitude and potential, so did

10200-717: Was not translated into English. They began work on this expansion soon afterwards and thus created the Universal Decimal Classification . During this time, Otlet and his wife then had two sons, Marcel and Jean, in quick succession. Otlet founded the Institut International de Bibliographie (IIB) in 1895, later renamed as (in English) the International Federation for Information and Documentation (FID). In 1894, he had Art Nouveau architect Octave van Rysselberghe build his mansion in Brussels,

10302-548: Was originally based on Melvil Dewey's Decimal classification system. Otlet and La Fontaine contacted Melvil Dewey to inquire if they could modify the Dewey Decimal System to suit the parameters of their bibliographic project, namely, organizing information in the social and natural sciences. Dewey granted them permission as long as it substantially differed from his original version. They worked with numerous subject experts, for example with Herbert Haviland Field at

10404-446: Was understood as a player in the historical development of global organization in modernity – indeed, a major player inasmuch as that organization was dependent on the organization and transmission of information." Otlet and Lafontaine (who won the Nobel Prize in 1913) not only envisioned later technical innovations but also projected a global vision for information and information technologies that speaks directly to postwar visions of

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