Leveraging Semantic Web Technologies to Enhance Individual and Collaborative Learning

AlAgha, Iyad

doi:10.1109/picict.2013.11

Cited by 1 publication

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“…As Rayward (1994) recounts, Otlet and his IIB/FID, in seeking to apply the "monographic principle" (p. 240) to distill accurate, concise statements of fact on every conceivable topic, were early in exploring the concepts of nodes and chunks that remain fundamental to hypertext design (pp. 237, 240-43;AlAgha, 2012;AlAgha, 2013;Day, 2001, pp. 9, 16), 4 while the UDC, with its early faceted structure, sought to allow crossreference and linking of related documents, chunks, and nodes through a kind of sophisticated abstract symbolic logical language analogous to mathematics-like an early-day computer code (Rayward, 1997, p. 292).…”

Section: Paul Otlet the Iib/fid And The Prewar Documentation Movementmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Continuing Relevance of Paul Otlet, the International Institute of Bibliography/International Federation for Documentation, and the Documentation Movement for Information Science and Studies

Dewey¹

2014

InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies

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. The IIB's ambitious goal was to assemble a "truly universal catalog of all knowledge" (Rayward, 1997, p. 291). Yet after promising early activity and international cooperation, the IIB's progress toward its goal was stalled first by the cataclysm of World War I (Gilliland, 2014, p. 65), then by the Great Depression. In 1934, the Belgian government, which had long subsidized the IIB's vast, hard-copy collection, conceived as a global master database of information and known originally as the Palais Mondial and later as the Mundaneum, withdrew funding and closed and locked the building where the collection was stored (Rayward, 1975, pp. 350-51). Before the Mundaneum could reopen, the Second World War began, and in May 1940, Belgium and France fell victim to the then seemingly invincible armies of Nazi Germany's Third Reich. Nazi authorities later commandeered the building housing the Mundaneum and destroyed 63 tons of collected materials before the collection could be relocated (Rayward, 1997, p. 361). Otlet, his lifelong dreams dashed, died in December 1944 in a war-torn Europe still not yet fully liberated from Nazi tyranny (Rayward, 1975, p. 361;Wright, 2008).Thus, the IIB, the Mundaneum, and much of the whole vision of Otlet and La Fontaine, however ambitious, ultimately failed. As such, it is entirely too easy to write off their entire project as irrelevant.The FID continued after the death of Otlet, but it, too, is now entirely part of history, having finally closed its doors altogether in 2002 (Buckland, n.d. a). America in particular, but also the modern world generally, often shows an adolescent-like tendency to imagine that history may be freely ignored and left behind as we march bravely toward the bright, technology-laden future-a tendency showcased in Henry Ford's (in)famous comment in 1916, "History is bunk" (Mencken, 1948, p. 539). 1 By that rubric, not only historical failures, but even historical successes, are irrelevant just for being part of history. If nothing in history is relevant, then by that reasoning, the postwar FID, too, is consigned to irrelevance. Ford, for all his talents, was neither a philosopher nor an intellectual, 1 Mencken gives the short version of the quote that has become best remembered in history. The full quote, from an interview Ford gave to the Chicago Tribune in 1916, allegedly reads, "History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history that we make today" (Martin, 2014). 2 Although sources discussing the marginalization of history and of the humanities are legion, as simple Google searches for "marginalization of history" or "marginalization of the humanities" attest, these statements were viscerally triggered by the experience of observing a law professor with background in a social science challenge a visiting lecturer, a historian, by asking pointedly how her historical research on the Civil War and Reconstruction could ever possibly be relevant.

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Section: Paul Otlet the Iib/fid And The Prewar Documentation Movementmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Continuing Relevance of Paul Otlet, the International Institute of Bibliography/International Federation for Documentation, and the Documentation Movement for Information Science and Studies

Dewey¹

2014

InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Leveraging Semantic Web Technologies to Enhance Individual and Collaborative Learning

Cited by 1 publication

References 9 publications

The Continuing Relevance of Paul Otlet, the International Institute of Bibliography/International Federation for Documentation, and the Documentation Movement for Information Science and Studies

The Continuing Relevance of Paul Otlet, the International Institute of Bibliography/International Federation for Documentation, and the Documentation Movement for Information Science and Studies

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