Alex Wright, the author of the book Glut on information through the ages, has a great piece in today's New York Times science section that makes clear that we humans have hungered for a world wide web decades, at least, before we had the technology to bring it into existence. Wright visits the Mundaneum, a building in Mons, Belgium, that Paul Otlet intended to use to house all the world's information. Otlet's 1934 vision for his interlinked multimedia web of information predates Vannevar Bush's proposal for a memex "memory extender" -- what's often credited as the intellectual genesis of the web -- by about a decade:
Historians typically trace the origins of the World Wide Web through a lineage of Anglo-American inventors like Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson. But more than half a century before Tim Berners-Lee released the first Web browser in 1991, Otlet (pronounced ot-LAY) described a networked world where "anyone in his armchair would be able to contemplate the whole of creation."
Read the whole thing to get a sense of how comprehensive Otlet's vision was. But one thing to note is that unlike the dumb-link web we've got going today, where the relationship between two hyperlinked items is never more than "A links to B," Otlet's vision included clever links that described the nature of the connection between nodes -- something like the semantic web that Berners-Lee has been push to evolve the web to for some time now.
Otlet's overall prescience makes me wonder if maybe both he and Berners-Lee are on to something. One ding against the idea of a semantic web has been that nobody is going to put the kind of time in that would be necessary to tag, classify, and intelligently link all the web's information. Huh. Maybe all the energy that we're sinking a la Clay Shirky into YouTube and Twitter and MySpace Facebook and so on suggests that in 2008 we're very willing to put that kind of time into creating a smarter web?
Wright has some great photos of the Mundaneum up on his personal site, one of which he kindly said was okay for me to use above. Also, there is a film about Otlet called "The Man Who Wanted to Classify the World," and Kevin Kelly has the details on that over in his extensive library on documentaries.
