Byline: By danny hakim section: Section B; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 1 Length

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SUBJECT: WATER SUPPLY UTILITIES (88%); ENGINEERING (87%); DROUGHT (79%); WATER QUALITY REGULATION (79%); ELECTRIC POWER PLANTS (77%); ELECTRICITY TRANSMISSION & DISTRIBUTION (77%); ELECTRONICS (77%); FOOD & BEVERAGE (77%); POWER PLANTS (77%); CHEMICAL ENGINEERING (77%); FRANCHISING (75%); FOOD INDUSTRY (73%); DEVELOPING COUNTRIES (72%); SEWERAGE SYSTEMS (71%); SEMICONDUCTOR MFG (66%); PHARMACEUTICAL PREPARATION MFG (63%); BIOTECHNOLOGY INDUSTRY (50%); FRANCHISEES (67%)
COMPANY: VEOLIA ENVIRONNEMENT SA (72%); CULLIGAN INTERNATIONAL CO (83%); SIEMENS AG (58%); GENERAL ELECTRIC CO (58%)
TICKER: VIE (PAR) (72%); VE (NYSE) (72%); SIE (LSE) (58%); SIE (FRA) (58%); SI (NYSE) (58%); GNE (PAR) (58%); GEC (LSE) (58%); GEB (BRU) (58%); GE (NYSE) (58%); SIN (SWX) (58%)
INDUSTRY: NAICS562111 SOLID WASTE COLLECTION (72%); NAICS221320 SEWAGE TREATMENT FACILITIES (72%); NAICS221310 WATER SUPPLY & IRRIGATION SYSTEMS (72%); NAICS335110 ELECTRIC LAMP BULB & PART MANUFACTURING (58%); NAICS334513 INSTRUMENTS & RELATED PRODUCTS MANUFACTURING FOR MEASURING, DISPLAYING & CONTROLLING INDUSTRIAL PROCESS VARIABLES (58%); NAICS334413 SEMICONDUCTOR & RELATED DEVICE MANUFACTURING (58%); NAICS334210 TELEPHONE APPARATUS MANUFACTURING (58%); SIC3823 INDUSTRIAL INSTRUMENTS FOR MEASUREMENT, DISPLAY & CONTROL OF PROCESS VARIABLES & RELATED PRODUCTS (58%); SIC3661 TELEPHONE & TELEGRAPH APPARATUS (58%); SIC3641 ELECTRIC LAMP BULBS & TUBES (58%); NAICS336412 AIRCRAFT ENGINE & ENGINE PARTS MANUFACTURING (84%); NAICS335222 HOUSEHOLD REFRIGERATOR & HOME FREEZER MANUFACTURING (84%); NAICS335211 ELECTRIC HOUSEWARES & HOUSEHOLD FAN MANUFACTURING (84%); SIC3724 AIRCRAFT ENGINES & ENGINE PARTS (58%); SIC3634 ELECTRIC HOUSEWARES & FANS (58%)
GEOGRAPHIC: LOS ANGELES, CA, USA (91%) CALIFORNIA, USA (93%) UNITED STATES (93%)
LOAD-DATE: June 19, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: Victor Herrera, a technician, testing quality at Puretec Industrial Water, which makes equipment for highly filtered water.

Jed Harris, left, and his father, Jim Harris, the president of Puretec, which started as a water-softening franchise.(PHOTOGRAPHS BY MONICA ALMEIDA/THE NEW YORK TIMES)

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The New York Times
June 19, 2008 Thursday

Late Edition - Final

2 School Entrepreneurs Lead the Way on Change
BYLINE: By SAM DILLON
SECTION: Section A; Column 0; National Desk; Pg. 16
LENGTH: 1358 words
As the founder of Teach for America, a nonprofit program that recruits elite college graduates to teach in low-income schools, Wendy Kopp has presided over many triumphs, and the group's annual dinner last month was another. It raised $5.5 million in one night and brought so many corporate executives to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York that stretch limousines jammed Park Avenue for blocks.

Watching discreetly from the ballroom floor was Ms. Kopp's husband, Richard Barth. In the early years of Teach for America, he was one of her closest aides. Today he runs the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, a charter school network that has won praise for turning low-achieving poor children into solid students.

Ms. Kopp and Mr. Barth are a power couple in the world of education, emblematic of a new class of young social entrepreneurs seeking to reshape the United States' educational landscape by creating new schools, training better principals and getting more smart young teachers into needy classrooms. The couple may not be as well known as Bill and Melinda Gates, but their fast-growing organizations have become incubators of new ways of thinking about education.

Teach for America, founded in 1989, has 14,000 alumni, some of whom have founded charter schools and other educational start-ups, or are rising leaders in school systems nationwide. Among them are Michelle Rhee, the hard-charging schools chancellor in Washington, D.C., and Dave Levin and Michael Feinberg, who founded KIPP in Houston and the Bronx with schools on an extended-day schedule and the slogan ''no shortcuts.''

The effort to reconstruct the schools in New Orleans and manage 41 charters there is thick with educators who have worked with Ms. Kopp and Mr. Barth.

Ms. Kopp describes Teach for America as a social movement to improve education for the poor. ''We have the potential to end educational inequity,'' she said in an interview at her headquarters in the garment district of Manhattan. ''I truly believe that.''

And she has big ambitions; she is urging alumni to run for public office, aiming to see 100 elected by 2010. In Houston, Natasha Kamrani, a former Teach for America member, sits on that city's nine-member school board, and a dozen other alumni are on boards in Washington, Chicago and elsewhere.

''School boards can be a steppingstone to higher forms of political leadership,'' Ms. Kopp said.

Some prominent academics are skeptical.

''Teach for America and these other new entrepreneurs are on to something, but they're not near to changing classroom teaching nationwide,'' said Larry Cuban, an emeritus professor at Stanford University. ''They're still a relatively minor force, and the best they can hope for is incremental change.''

But others think they just might etch important changes on the nation's schools.

''My generation thought the same thing, and we did change the schools a lot,'' said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of Great City Schools, which represents the nation's largest urban systems. ''We pursued change through civil rights laws and by seeking adequate funding and through legislation. They're pursuing it through entrepreneurship, trying to bring in fresh blood and new energy.''

Ms. Kopp has built her group into a powerhouse, with an annual budget of $120 million, a national staff of 835, and partnerships with Goldman Sachs, Google and other blue-chip names. This spring, she presided over its most successful campus recruiting campaign, and made Time magazine's list of the world's 100 most influential people.

Mr. Barth is a low-key executive, but like his wife, he can sound like a community organizer when he talks about shaking up schools.

''In a country as great as ours, why should where you're born dictate your life outcome?'' Mr. Barth said in a separate interview in his Manhattan office (the couple declined to be interviewed together). ''Anyone, born anywhere, should have access to high-quality schools.''

At KIPP, Mr. Barth is leading a closely watched effort to build a network of 65 charter schools into a much larger organization that can enroll a significant share of public school students in Houston, New Orleans, Washington and elsewhere. The couple have a baby daughter and three sons who attend public school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where the family lives. Ms. Kopp takes charge of the children's schedule and makes sure they do their homework. Mr. Barth umpires Little League games.

''They're both super disciplined,'' said Iris Chen, a Harvard Law graduate who worked with the couple at Teach for America. ''Wendy maximizes every minute. She knows she'll have to wait in line to get her Starbucks, so she figures out how to use that time.''

Ms. Kopp got the idea for Teach for America when she was an undergraduate at Princeton. She had been valedictorian at an affluent Texas high school and found college easy. But a roommate who had attended Bronx public schools struggled, persuading Ms. Kopp that public schools shortchanged poor students.

''I thought our country should be recruiting the most talented students to teach in our poorest schools as aggressively as we were being recruited to work on Wall Street,'' she recalled.

Ms. Kopp's senior thesis became a proposal for a national teaching corps, and after graduation in 1989, she set the plan in motion.

She met Mr. Barth that fall, when she was hiring her fledgling staff. Mr. Barth, a Harvard graduate and the son of a pharmaceuticals executive, applied for a job. He had undergone his own epiphany, counseling working-class high school students in Boston who guidance counselors said were drifting even though they had college potential.

''Those kids were so capable but nobody was painting a picture for them of what was possible,'' he said.

Ms. Kopp hired him, and by 1994, they were dating.

In those early years, Ms. Kopp spent much time fund-raising. Mr. Barth supervised corps members and, during a budget crisis, imposed a spending freeze. In 1995, he left the group, soon joining Edison Schools, a for-profit school management company. The two married in 1998.

Since the mid-1990s, prominent academics have argued that Teach for America's two-year assignment ensures that recruits leave just as they are learning to teach. ''You lose them just when they are becoming effective,'' said Linda Darling-Hammond, an education professor at Stanford.

David C. Berliner, an education professor at Arizona State University, said Teach for America recruits brought a missionary zeal to classrooms but were unprepared for teaching. ''They think, 'We can solve the problems of urban education because we're smarter than everybody else,' '' Professor Berliner said. ''There's some arrogance there.''

Such critiques once damaged fund-raising. But over the years, Teach for America has attracted significant numbers of highly qualified recruits to long-term careers in education. A third of its alumni have stayed in the classroom after their two years, and many others have become principals or educational entrepreneurs.

Since 2000, Doris and Donald Fisher, founders of the Gap clothing chain, have given $75 million to KIPP and Teach for America, encouraging cooperation. Today 60 percent of KIPP's principals are Teach for America alumni. The relationship tightened in 2005, when Mr. Barth became chief executive of KIPP's national nonprofit organization.

Although Ms. Kopp said that she ''definitely'' did not like the spotlight, she is often in it. In 2000, she met with President Bill Clinton at the White House, and President and Laura Bush have visited several Teach for America schools. In 2005, Mr. Bush invited the couple, along with senators, Supreme Court justices and four-star generals, to a black-tie dinner at the White House honoring Prince Charles.

Ms. Kopp, who turns 41 this month, mused about approaching middle age, noting that recruits have taken to calling her Miss Kopp instead of Wendy.

''I never considered back when this all started that it would be my life's work,'' she said, ''but here I am, it's nearly 20 years later.''
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: TEACHING & TEACHERS (92%); EDUCATION SYSTEMS & INSTITUTIONS (90%); PUBLIC SCHOOLS (90%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (90%); PRIMARY & SECONDARY SCHOOL TEACHERS (89%); EDUCATION (89%); SCHOOL BOARDS (88%); SCHOOL PRINCIPALS (78%); NONPROFIT ORGANIZATIONS (78%); COLLEGE & UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS (78%); ALUMNI (78%); STUDENTS & STUDENT LIFE (78%); CHARTER SCHOOLS (74%); INTERVIEWS (61%); LOW INCOME PERSONS (78%)
PERSON: BILL GATES (55%); MICHAEL MCMAHON (80%)
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW YORK, NY, USA (92%); NEW ORLEANS, LA, USA (79%) NEW YORK, USA (92%); LOUISIANA, USA (79%); DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, USA (79%) UNITED STATES (96%)
LOAD-DATE: June 19, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: Richard Barth runs KIPP, a charter school network. (PHOTOGRAPH BY ETHAN PINES) (pg. A23)

Wendy Kopp founded Teach for America, a national program that recruits college graduates to teach in low-income schools. (PHOTOGRAPH BY MIKE OLIVER) (pg. A23)

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

664 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
June 19, 2008 Thursday

Late Edition - Final

No Longer the Capital, But a Global Destination
BYLINE: By NICHOLAS KULISH
SECTION: Section A; Column 0; Foreign Desk; BONN JOURNAL; Pg. 10
LENGTH: 1085 words
DATELINE: BONN, Germany
Someone forgot to turn out the lights in Bonn.

Germany's former capital, known derisively as the ''Hauptdorf,'' or capital village, is supposed to be a relic of the past, nine years after Parliament and the embassies picked up and moved to Berlin. But the little city on the Rhine, immortalized by John le Carre as ''a small town in Germany'' in his spy novel of the same title, has succeeded in the unlikely goal of remaking itself as a place of the future.

Local officials and entrepreneurs combined shrewd spending and no small amount of federal largess with the city's prime location in the Rhine Valley to refashion it into an international campus for everything from medical research to alternative energy to the United Nations, which began opening offices here in 1996.

Since the Bundestag and the Chancellery left in 1999, Bonn, rather than watching employment plummet, has seen an increase of more than 12,000 jobs in a modest-size city of just 315,000 people.

Bonn, like Germany itself, appears to have been written off far too soon. Unemployment in Germany is at its lowest level in 15 years. And while it is expected to slow, the German economy grew at an annual rate of 6 percent in the first quarter of this year.

Though it is bound to be overtaken by the breakneck growth of China, this old standby in Old Europe -- with only one-sixteenth of China's population -- is by many statistical measures still the world's third biggest economy, behind only the United States and Japan. It is also the world's leading exporter of goods, second to none thanks to its thriving, high-end manufacturing sector.

The country's former Parliament building is now a convention center, with a bigger facility going up beside it amid a thicket of cranes. Bonn is also home to SolarWorld, one of the leading companies in Germany's top-flight solar-energy industry.

Health care accounts for 1 in 10 jobs in the city and surrounding area. The central government announced in March that Bonn had been selected as the site of a new $1 billion dementia research center.

Downtown, the dominant feature of the city's skyline has appeared since the central government left. The 40-story steel and glass Post Tower of Deutsche Post, the postal service that employs 7,000 people in and around Bonn, towers over the city. It opened in December 2002, two years after Deutsche Post went public. Deutsche Telekom is the region's largest employer, with some 12,000 employees.

''It's really a city that I feel growing in importance and not the other way around,'' said Torbjorn Possne, an executive at the wireless equipment maker Ericsson, which has offices here.

Both Germany and its former capital, which former Chancellor Helmut Kohl referred to as a ''symbol of conspicuous modesty,'' have reasons to be understated about their strengths. Germany's tendency to bury its power and influence in international institutions, chiefly the European Union but also the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, allows it to exert its influence without tempting accusations of revanchist ambitions after the two world wars.

For Bonn, the city's receipt of more than $2.2 billion from the federal government from 1994 to 2004 to ease the transition of losing Parliament, bred no small amount of resentment around the country. And by law the city held on to some 20,000 government jobs, including the headquarters of half a dozen ministries. Taxpayer groups say the result is wasted money and commuting time for employees shuttling back and forth from Berlin, and environmentalists have complained about the excess pollution as a result of the excessive air travel.

''One remains very reserved about it,'' said Jorg Haas, chief executive at HWB AG, a private equity group based in Bonn.

Mr. Haas is less reserved about the gap between his country's reputation and its economic reality. ''Germany is always written off, but if you look at the numbers it just isn't true,'' said Mr. Haas, who moved his previous software company to Bonn from Cologne in 2001.

''In the past, we tried a great deal of offshoring in the countries to the east; we went to Hungary, to Poland,'' Mr. Haas said. ''We brought everything back because at the end of the day the most productive structure and the most affordable place to develop and produce software is Germany,'' he said, citing the education, efficiency and reliability of the workers, as well as the physical infrastructure in Germany.

Now Mr. Haas and his partners have bet their money on the future of Bonn, building a $465 million real estate development at a scenic bend in the Rhine. The luxury Elysion Hotel, under construction, was originally planned for 160 rooms, but strong local growth led them back to the drawing board to expand it to 254 rooms.

The views of the Rhine from Mr. Haas's office -- with long, narrow barges filled with sand and stone heading toward the Netherlands -- are breathtaking, as are those of the peaks of the Siebengebirge hills, including the famous Petersberg and the Drachenfels, where, according to some legends, Siegfried slew the dragon.

The city still benefits from its time as the cold war capital. The federal government spent half a century trying to give Bonn the trappings of a historic capital. As a result, Bonn sometimes feels like a small city on steroids, with all the perks and benefits normally associated with big-city living, like a subway system and top-notch museums and concert halls, not to mention international schools.

Its time as the capital also gave the city name recognition few smaller cities could hope for, which helped it gain a reputation for medical tourism among civil servants from less developed countries.

Jurgen Reul, a specialist in neuroradiology, just opened a private clinic specializing in minimally invasive surgery for neurovascular and spine problems. Operations started on the first of the month and foreign patients from everywhere from Persian Gulf states to Russia have helped the clinic fully book its first month of appointments, leaving it with a waiting list.

''Bonn was pronounced dead, and then everybody went ahead and proved the opposite,'' Dr. Reul said. ''Now there's a gold rush mood.'' Dr. Reul has a unique perspective. Before starting his medical studies, he worked as a police officer on diplomatic security details in the mid-1970s. ''We used to say that it was a sleepy nest of bureaucrats,'' he said. ''It's a living city now.''
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: POPULATION SIZE (78%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (78%); ENERGY RESEARCH (74%); ELECTRIC POWER PLANTS (74%); ENERGY & UTILITY SECTOR PERFORMANCE (74%); RENEWABLE ENERGY (74%); HEALTH CARE (74%); ECONOMIC GROWTH (73%); EMBASSIES & CONSULATES (72%); NOVELS & SHORT STORIES (71%); STATISTICS (70%); TELECOMMUNICATIONS (70%); SOLAR ENERGY (69%); RESEARCH INSTITUTES (69%); MANUFACTURING SECTOR PERFORMANCE (69%); WIRELESS INDUSTRY (66%); MANUFACTURING OUTPUT (65%); POSTAL SERVICE (63%); ELECTRIC POWER INDUSTRY (62%); MYSTERY & SUSPENSE LITERATURE (56%); MEDICAL RESEARCH (75%)
COMPANY: DEUTSCHE POST AG (58%); DEUTSCHE TELEKOM AG (58%); CNINSURE INC (91%)
ORGANIZATION: UNITED NATIONS (56%)
TICKER: DPW (FRA) (58%); DTE (FRA) (58%); DT (NYSE) (58%); 9496 (TSE) (58%); CISG (NASDAQ) (91%)
INDUSTRY: NAICS491110 POSTAL SERVICE (58%); SIC4215 COURIER SERVICES EX. BY AIR (58%); NAICS517210 WIRELESS TELECOMMUNICATIONS CARRIERS (EXCEPT SATELLITE) (58%); NAICS517110 WIRED TELECOMMUNICATIONS CARRIERS (58%); SIC4813 TELEPHONE COMMUNICATIONS, EXCEPT RADIOTELEPHONE (58%)
GEOGRAPHIC: BERLIN, GERMANY (92%) GERMANY (95%); CENTRAL EUROPE (88%); JAPAN (79%); EUROPE (79%); UNITED STATES (79%)
LOAD-DATE: June 19, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: A business park being built near the Rhine in Bonn, which can feel like a small city on steroids. (PHOTOGRAPH BY MARTIN SPECHT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

665 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
June 17, 2008 Tuesday

Correction Appended

Late Edition - Final
The Web Time Forgot
BYLINE: By ALEX WRIGHT
SECTION: Section F; Column 0; Science Desk; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1911 words
DATELINE: MONS, Belgium
On a fog-drizzled Monday afternoon, this fading medieval city feels like a forgotten place. Apart from the obligatory Gothic cathedral, there is not much to see here except for a tiny storefront museum called the Mundaneum, tucked down a narrow street in the northeast corner of town. It feels like a fittingly secluded home for the legacy of one of technology's lost pioneers: Paul Otlet.

In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or ''electric telescopes,'' as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a ''reseau,'' which might be translated as ''network'' -- or arguably, ''web.''

Historians typically trace the origins of the World Wide Web through a lineage of Anglo-American inventors like Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson. But more than half a century before Tim Berners-Lee released the first Web browser in 1991, Otlet (pronounced ot-LAY) described a networked world where ''anyone in his armchair would be able to contemplate the whole of creation.''

Although Otlet's proto-Web relied on a patchwork of analog technologies like index cards and telegraph machines, it nonetheless anticipated the hyperlinked structure of today's Web. ''This was a Steampunk version of hypertext,'' said Kevin Kelly, former editor of Wired, who is writing a book about the future of technology.

Otlet's vision hinged on the idea of a networked machine that joined documents using symbolic links. While that notion may seem obvious today, in 1934 it marked a conceptual breakthrough. ''The hyperlink is one of the most underappreciated inventions of the last century,'' Mr. Kelly said. ''It will go down with radio in the pantheon of great inventions.''

Today, Otlet and his work have been largely forgotten, even in his native Belgium. Although Otlet enjoyed considerable fame during his lifetime, his legacy fell victim to a series of historical misfortunes -- not least of which involved the Nazis marching into Belgium and destroying much of his life's work.

But in recent years, a small group of researchers has begun to resurrect Otlet's reputation, republishing some of his writing and raising money to establish the museum and archive in Mons.

As the Mundaneum museum prepares to celebrate its 10th anniversary on Thursday, the curators are planning to release part of the original collection onto the present-day Web. That event will not only be a kind of posthumous vindication for Otlet, but it will also provide an opportunity to re-evaluate his place in Web history. Was the Mundaneum (mun-da-NAY-um) just a historical curiosity -- a technological road not taken -- or can his vision shed useful light on the Web as we know it?

Although Otlet spent his entire working life in the age before computers, he possessed remarkable foresight into the possibilities of electronic media. Paradoxically, his vision of a paperless future stemmed from a lifelong fascination with printed books.

Otlet, born in 1868, did not set foot in a schoolroom until age 12. His mother died when he was 3; his father was a successful entrepreneur who made a fortune selling trams all over the world. The senior Otlet kept his son out of school, out of a conviction that classrooms stifled children's natural abilities. Left at home with his tutors and with few friends, the young Otlet lived the life of a solitary bookworm.

When he finally entered secondary school, he made straight for the library. ''I could lock myself into the library and peruse the catalog, which for me was a miracle,'' he later wrote. Soon after entering school, Otlet took on the role of school librarian.

In the years that followed, Otlet never really left the library. Though his father pushed him into law school, he soon left the bar to return to his first love, books. In 1895, he met a kindred spirit in the future Nobel Prize winner Henri La Fontaine, who joined him in planning to create a master bibliography of all the world's published knowledge.

Even in 1895, such a project marked an act of colossal intellectual hubris. The two men set out to collect data on every book ever published, along with a vast collection of magazine and journal articles, photographs, posters and all kinds of ephemera -- like pamphlets -- that libraries typically ignored. Using 3 by 5 index cards (then the state of the art in storage technology), they went on to create a vast paper database with more than 12 million individual entries.

Otlet and LaFontaine eventually persuaded the Belgian government to support their project, proposing to build a ''city of knowledge'' that would bolster the government's bid to become host of the League of Nations. The government granted them space in a government building, where Otlet expanded the operation. He hired more staff, and established a fee-based research service that allowed anyone in the world to submit a query via mail or telegraph -- a kind of analog search engine. Inquiries poured in from all over the world, more than 1,500 a year, on topics as diverse as boomerangs and Bulgarian finance.

As the Mundaneum evolved, it began to choke on the sheer volume of paper. Otlet started sketching ideas for new technologies to manage the information overload. At one point he posited a kind of paper-based computer, rigged with wheels and spokes that would move documents around on the surface of a desk. Eventually, however, Otlet realized the ultimate answer involved scrapping paper altogether.

Since there was no such thing as electronic data storage in the 1920s, Otlet had to invent it. He started writing at length about the possibility of electronic media storage, culminating in a 1934 book, ''Monde,'' where he laid out his vision of a ''mechanical, collective brain'' that would house all the world's information, made readily accessible over a global telecommunications network.

Tragically, just as Otlet's vision began to crystallize, the Mundaneum fell on hard times. In 1934, the Belgian government lost interest in the project after losing its bid for the League of Nations headquarters. Otlet moved it to a smaller space, and after financial struggles had to close it to the public.

A handful of staff members kept working on the project, but the dream ended when the Nazis marched through Belgium in 1939. The Germans cleared out the original Mundaneum site to make way for an exhibit of Third Reich art, destroying thousands of boxes filled with index cards. Otlet died in 1944, a broken and soon-to-be-forgotten man.

After Otlet's death, what survived of the original Mundaneum was left to languish in an old anatomy building of the Free University in the Parc Leopold until 1968, when a young graduate student named W. Boyd Rayward picked up the paper trail. Having read some of Otlet's work, he traveled to the abandoned office in Brussels, where he discovered a mausoleumlike room full of books and mounds of paper covered in cobwebs.

Mr. Rayward has since helped lead a resurgence of interest in Otlet's work, a movement that eventually fueled enough interest to prompt development of the Mundaneum museum in Mons.

Today, the new Mundaneum reveals tantalizing glimpses of a Web that might have been. Long rows of catalog drawers hold millions of Otlet's index cards, pointing the way into a back-room archive brimming with books, posters, photos, newspaper clippings and all kinds of other artifacts. A team of full-time archivists have managed to catalog less than 10 percent of the collection.

The archive's sheer sprawl reveals both the possibilities and the limits of Otlet's original vision. Otlet envisioned a team of professional catalogers analyzing every piece of incoming information, a philosophy that runs counter to the bottom-up ethos of the Web.

''I think Otlet would have felt lost with the Internet,'' said his biographer, Francoise Levie. Even with a small army of professional librarians, the original Mundaneum could never have accommodated the sheer volume of information produced on the Web today.

''I don't think it could have scaled up,'' Mr. Rayward said. ''It couldn't even scale up to meet the demands of the paper-based world he was living in.''

Those limitations notwithstanding, Otlet's version of hypertext held a few important advantages over today's Web. For one thing, he saw a smarter kind of hyperlink. Whereas links on the Web today serve as a kind of mute bond between documents, Otlet envisioned links that carried meaning by, for example, annotating if particular documents agreed or disagreed with each other. That facility is notably lacking in the dumb logic of modern hyperlinks.

Otlet also saw the possibilities of social networks, of letting users ''participate, applaud, give ovations, sing in the chorus.'' While he very likely would have been flummoxed by the anything-goes environment of Facebook or MySpace, Otlet saw some of the more productive aspects of social networking -- the ability to trade messages, participate in discussions and work together to collect and organize documents.

Some scholars believe Otlet also foresaw something like the Semantic Web, the emerging framework for subject-centric computing that has been gaining traction among computer scientists like Mr. Berners-Lee. Like the Semantic Web, the Mundaneum aspired not just to draw static links between documents, but also to map out conceptual relationships between facts and ideas. ''The Semantic Web is rather Otlet-ish,'' said Michael Buckland, a professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.

Critics of the Semantic Web say it relies too heavily on expert programmers to create ontologies (formalized descriptions of concepts and relationships) that will let computers exchange data with one another more easily. The Semantic Web ''may be useful, but it is bound to fail,'' Dr. Buckland said, adding, ''It doesn't scale because nobody will provide enough labor to build it.''

The same criticism could have been leveled against the Mundaneum. Just as Otlet's vision required a group of trained catalogers to classify the world's knowledge, so the Semantic Web hinges on an elite class of programmers to formulate descriptions for a potentially vast range of information. For those who advocate such labor-intensive data schemes, the fate of the Mundaneum may offer a cautionary tale.

The curators of today's Mundaneum hope the museum avoids its predecessor's fate. Although the museum has consistently managed to secure financing, it struggles to attract visitors.

''The problem is that no one knows the story of the Mundaneum,'' said the lead archivist, Stephanie Manfroid. ''People are not necessarily excited to go see an archive. It's like, would you rather go see the latest 'Star Wars' movie, or would you rather go see a giant card catalog?''

Striving to broaden its appeal, the museum stages regular exhibits of posters, photographs and contemporary art. And while only a trickle of tourists make their way to the little museum in Mons, the town may yet find its way onto the technological history map. Later this year, a new corporate citizen plans to open a data center on the edge of town: Google.