The interest of Ingetraut Dahlberg in documentation started when at the age of 10 years when she received a camera from her father at Christmas.

She studied Philosophy, History, Anglistics, Catholic Theology, and Biology at the universities of Frankfurt, Würzburg and Düsseldorf with one college year in the United States in between.

[1][3] In 1961 she changed to abstracting work on economical topics in the “Rationalisierungs-Kuratorium der Deutschen Wirtschaft” (Board of Rationalisation and Innovation for the German Economy).

[1] She also was asked to establish a Committee for Thesaurus Research and Classification[1] to be chaired by Prof. Martin Scheele with Ingetraut Dahlberg acting as secretary.

In 1970, she was also delegated to cooperate in a Committee for Classification and Indexing in the context of the UNISIST-Program[R 9] of UNESCO, headed by Douglas John Foskett.

In 1971, she left the DGD in order to take up a postgraduate study in Philosophy with Prof. Alwin Diemer in Düsseldorf on further subjects such as General Linguistics and History of science (1971–1973).

Her doctoral advisor suggested the scope and title: A Universal Classification System of Knowledge: its ontological, science-theoretical and information-theoretical foundations[1] (English translation).

Dahlberg obtained her degree in 1973; the thesis was published in 1974 by Verlag Dokumentation K. Saur as: Foundations for a universal organization of knowledge (Grundlagen universaler Wissensordnung).

Since its very beginning the journal contained – next to scientific articles – also a section on news, book reviews, and a continuing bibliography of current classification literature.

Its first presentation took place in Bangalore, India, during a seminar at S. R. Ranganathan's Documentation Research and Training Centre (the DRTC).

[R 16] In 1979, Ingetraut Dahlberg and her son Wolfgang set up a firm under the name of INDEKS purporting to establish indexes and classification systems.

For a meeting on 12 February 1977, Dahlberg invited representatives from libraries and documentation centres, commodity cataloguers, physics, chemistry and mathematics to come to Frankfurt in order to found the “Gesellschaft für Klassifikation e.V.

Charles Gilreath from Texas A&M University became the new editor-in-chief for Knowledge Organization and Hanne Albrechtsen[R 20] from Denmark became the new ISKO president for the rest of Dahlberg's elected time.

Her special library of classification, terminology and information science literature went to the Maastricht McLuhan Institute for Digital Culture and Knowledge Organization, directed by Prof. Dr. Kim H.

[16] Her recent book, published 2014, on “Knowledge Organization, Development, Task, Application, Future”[17] also details some of the activities mentioned.

It addresses particularly computer scientists, in order to convey to them a humanistic view on the content related treatment of their data, but turns also to readers wishing to access the topic principally.

She considers indeed this field to be explored within an institute or an academy since there is such a huge amount of work to be accomplished under the fruitful auspices of the whole array of insights gained so far.

Apart from her own scientific work, she considerably contributed to furthering these topics also by the founding the journal “International Classification” in 1974 under its later name Knowledge Organization.

[R 24][R 25] Ingetraut Dahlberg deplores the dispersion of knowledge in our times and finds the reason for this development in the diversity of thesauri and also of subject-oriented ontologies.

Above all, the book's purpose is to direct attention to the enormous significance of a universal order of knowledge embracing all necessary aspect of interdisciplinarity in present-day research which precisely is totally neglected by the multitude of existent ontologies and their reductive effect.