Schema.org and One Hundred Years of Search by Dan Brickley.
From the post:
Slides and video are already in the Web, but I wanted to post this as an excuse to plug the new Web History Community Group that Max and I have just started at W3C. The talk was part of the Libraries, Media and the Semantic Web meetup hosted by the BBC in March. It gave an opportunity to run through some forgotten history, linking Paul Otlet, the Universal Decimal Classification, schema.org and some 100 year old search logs from Otlet’s Mundaneum. Having worked with the BBC Lonclass system (a descendant of Otlet’s UDC), and collaborated with the Aida Slavic of the UDC on their publication of Linked Data, I was happy to be given the chance to try to spell out these hidden connections. It also turned out that Google colleagues have been working to support the Mundaneum and the memory of this early work, and I’m happy that the talk led to discussions with both the Mundaneum and Computer History Museum about the new Web History group at W3C.
Sounds like a great starting point!
But the intellectual history of indexing and search runs far deeper than one hundred years. Our current efforts are likely to profit from a deeper knowledge of our roots.