Mundaneum

An "Internet of Paper" concieved by Paul Otlet in the 1930s. wikipedia

Clay Shirky has compared the Otlet vision of the Universal Decimal Classification to the early Yahoo! vision, and makes the valid point that in the great march of history ontology lost. html

However, there are a few intersecting ideas in the Mundaneum. Public over Private. Ontology over Folksonomy. Alex Wright replies to Shirky arguing that it's important to keep one's eye on the unique aspects:

Otlet matters not because he believed in universal classification, but because he recognized the importance of associative trails and collaborative authorship, directly presaging the visions of Bush, Nelson et al. His belief in the possibility of marrying classification with social context is important not because he advocated classification, but because he foresaw the possibilities of self-organizing systems. html

The Otlet vision was used in service of popularizers of the Semantic Web in the early aughts. wayback

Additional Resources:

"The Future of the Web is 100 Years Old " by Alex Wright