Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet (; ; 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, he is among those considered to be the father of information science, a field he called "documentation". Otlet created the Universal Decimal Classification, which would later become a faceted classification. Otlet was responsible for the development of an early information retrieval tool, the "" (RBU) which utilized 3x5 inch index cards, used commonly in library catalogs around the world (now largely displaced by the advent of the online public access catalog (OPAC)). Otlet wrote numerous essays on how to collect and organize the world's knowledge, culminating in two books, the (1934) and (1935). In 1907, following a huge international conference, Otlet and Henri La Fontaine created the Central Office of International Associations, which was renamed to the Union of International Associations in 1910, and which is still located in Brussels. They also created a great international center called at first (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. They saw in this organization an emerging global polity, and wished to help solidify it. La Fontaine won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1913. Early life and career Otlet was born in Brussels, Belgium on 23 August 1868, the oldest child of Édouard Otlet (Brussels 13 June 1842-Blanquefort, France, 20 October 1907) and Maria (née Van Mons). His father, Édouard, 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. His father kept him out of school, hiring tutors instead, until he was 11, believing that classrooms were a stifling environment. Otlet, as a child, had few friends, and played regularly only with his younger brother Maurice. He soon developed a love of reading and