"Otlet's Universal Decimal Classification serves much the same purpose as RDF triples." #readingToday

As van den Heuvel argues, Otlet's Universal Decimal Classification serves much the same purpose as RDF triples. By expressing the relationships between classification numbers, Otlet's system establishes semantic links that can connect one concept to another; then, using the auxiliary tables of the Universal Decimal Classification (such as "+," "/," and ":"), the system can describe the nature of that relationship between topics, languages, geographical locations, and so forth. 10 Using this framework, one could imagine an application that would allow a user to explore an entire data universe of information about music and musicians by following trails of association from one data point to another. Other applications could then merge that data with other sources (a biographical database, a catalog of recordings, and a fan site, for example) to create new synthetic displays that gather content from multiple discrete collections. Otlet imagined that his bibliologists would synthesize information from multiple sources to give readers an overview of any given topic with links to support further exploration.

Cataloging the World, Alex Wright