About Great Visionaries — Paul Otlet, The Creator Of Modern Information Science

In 1900 Otlet predicted the creation of the Internet

Photo by Iñaki del Olmo on Unsplash

Many of us may not even realize that though the science of information gathering has existed since the beginning of human history, it is only recently that it has been formerly and effectively organized as a defined discipline. The person most responsible for this was Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet (August 23, 1868 — December 10, 1944). Otlet was an author, entrepreneur, visionary, lawyer, and peace activist; he is one of several people who are considered the father of information science, a field he called “documentation”.

After the Second World War Otlet’s ideas went out of fashion and he was largely forgotten. This all changed in the 1980s especially after the advent of the World Wide Web. By the early 1990s, a new interest arose in Otlet’s speculations and theories about the organization of knowledge, the use and theories about the organization of knowledge, the use of information technologies, and globalization.

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…