Classification: Universal Decimal

Able to cover every field of knowledge, from Philosophy to Engineering.

Otlet and La Fontaine didn't just want a library; they wanted a "city of knowledge". In 1895, they founded the Mundaneum in Mons, Belgium—a pre-digital precursor to Google. universal decimal classification

The UDC divides all human knowledge into ten main "houses" (classes), numbered 0 to 9: Able to cover every field of knowledge, from

To make this work, they needed a classification system that was: The UDC divides all human knowledge into ten

Their quest to catalog every piece of human thought led to the creation of the , a system built on the bones of the Dewey Decimal Classification but designed for far more than just books. The Vision: The Mundaneum

Using numbers that any person, regardless of language, could understand.

Using symbols like colons (:) or pluses (+) to show how different subjects—like Physics and Medicine —linked together to form new ideas like Biophysics . The System: A Mathematical Map of Mind