It’s not everyday that a Prime Minister visits your office. Today, Googlers in our Brussels office were honoured by a visit from Belgium’s Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo to celebrate and revive the memory of two unique Belgian inventors and pioneers. Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine envisaged a paper archival system of the world’s information. They built a giant international documentation centre called Mundaneum , with the goal of preserving peace by assembling knowledge and making it accessible to the entire world. For us at Google, this mission sounds familiar.universal decimal classification system , building from John Dewey’s early work. When La Fontaine won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1913 for his work as an activist in the international peace movement, he invested his winnings into the Mundaneum project, which was already underway. La Fontaine and Otlet collected 3-by-5 inch index cards to build a vast paper database which eventually contained some 16 million entries, covering everything from the history of hunting dogs to finance. The Belgian government granted them space in a government building and Otlet established a fee-based research service that allowed anyone in the world to submit a query via mail or telegraph. Inquiries poured in from all over the world. Louis Pouzin and Robert Cailliau are already scheduled to speak. online tour of its dazzling premises. At today’s event in the Google Brussels office, Prime Minister Di Rupo said he hopes that the Google-Mundaneum cooperation becomes a “wonderful forum for experimentation.” Di Rupo himself is passionate about the Mundaneum; as mayor of Mons, he was instrumental in preserving the archive. Street View . In Belgium, the internet accounts for 2.5% of GDP—and its contribution is expected to grow by more than 10% a year for the next five years. “If all our companies could take better advantages of these new technologies, its sure that our exports would get a boost,” Di Rupo said. LEO , the world’s first business computer, built by J.Lyons & Co , a leading British food manufacturer at the time that also ran a famous chain of tea shops. This past December, we celebrated the 60th anniversary of the formal recognition of Ukraine’s Sergey Lebedev’s pioneering MESM project . We’ve also given our support to help restore Bletchley Park , the site of the U.K.’s wartime codebreaking and home of Colossus , the world’s first electronic programmable computer.Posted by William Echikson, External Relations, Brussels
yes, a storage of mankind creativity in life
ReplyDeleteregistering every bit of information available to us at a single location can make a lot of sense in the beginning but today when information is not just a resource but a commodity, it does raise questions about how it must b preserved i am not against the idea of a single network on world information(SNOWI) as i call it it still is a subject frowned upon
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