Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet (/ɒtˈleɪ/; 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,[1] he is among those considered to be the father of information science, a field he called "documentation".

Otlet wrote numerous essays on how to collect and organize the world's knowledge, culminating in two books, the Traité de Documentation (1934) and Monde: Essai d'universalisme (1935).

They also created 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 the creation of new kinds of international organization.

A better storage system, Otlet wrote in his essay, would be cards containing individual "chunks" of information, that would allow "all the manipulations of classification and continuous interfiling."

[7] In 1891, Otlet met Henri La Fontaine, a fellow lawyer with shared interests in bibliography and international relations, and the two became good friends.

In 1894, he had Art Nouveau architect Octave van Rysselberghe build his mansion in Brussels, the so-called Hotel Otlet.

[8][9] 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".

[10] They worked with numerous subject experts, for example with Herbert Haviland Field at the Concilium Bibliographicum for Zoology, and completed this initial publication in 1907.

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 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.

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 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".

[11] 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.

In a large but decrepit building in Leopold Park they reconstituted 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.

Otlet’s idea to design 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).

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 the left bank in Antwerp (1941).

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".

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)[15] where he argued that white people or 'westernized' blacks were to be tasked with 'civilising' Africa.

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.

[17] Otlet’s organisational support to the 1921 Pan-African Congress at the Palais Mondial (later: Mundaneum) therefore needs to be considered in connection with 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.

[18] 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.

Beginning in the 1980s, and especially after the advent of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s, new interest arose in Otlet's speculations and theories about the organization of knowledge, the use of information technologies, and globalization.

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.