Paul Otlet

Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet was a Belgian author, entrepreneur, visionary, lawyer and peace activist he is one of several people who have been considered the father of information science, a field he called documentation. Otlet created the Universal Decimal Classification, one of the most prominent examples of faceted classification. Otlet was responsible for the widespread adoption in Europe of the standard American 3x5160inch index card used until recently in most library catalogs around the world . Otlet wrote numerous essays on how to collect and organize the worlds knowledge, culminating in two books, the Trait de Documentation and Monde Essai duniversalisme .

Otlet was born in Brussels, Belgium onAugust 1868, the oldest child of douard Otlet and Maria . His father, douard, 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.

Source: Wikipedia