n stark opposition to Otlet’s insistence that an ideal KOS be impersonaland universal, Kaiser firmly held to the view that, ideally, KOSs should beconstructed to meet the needs of the particular organizations for which they arebeing created. For example, with regard to the use of card indexes in businessenterprises, he asserted that “[e]ach business, each office has its individualcharacter and individual requirements, and its individual organization. Itssystem must do justice to this individual character [11, § 76].

Otlet, by contrast, was strongly opposed to organizing information unitsby the alphabetical order of their index terms. In his view, such a mode oforganization “scatters the [subject] matter under rubrics that have beenclassed arbitrarily in the order of letters and not at all in the order of ideas”and so obscures the conceptual relationships between them [6, p. 380]

For Kaiser, then, alphabetical order represented the interpretatively safest andmost user-friendly way of organizing information units by their subject terms.

on the guide card for each main entry term a list of the other main entry termswith which it stood in semantic relation: the latter included synonyms, broaderterms, narrower terms and related terms [8, § 415, 423]. The “logical key”served as the syndetic structure of the index, indicating a web of conceptualrelations otherwise unexpressed by the alphabetical structure of the index file.

Given that Kaiser acknowledged the utility of indicating semantic relationsbetween index terms, why did he prefer alphabetical to classified order forfiling? The answer lies in his view of language. Kaiser considered words innatural language to be imprecise expressions of the concepts that they areintended to convey. In addition, he held that there is little agreement amongusers of a language as to the precise definition of individual terms [8, §60–61, 112]. Such semantic indeterminism, in his opinion, makes it difficultto determine precisely what the authors of documents mean by the wordsthey are using, and any attempt by an indexer to substitute preferred termsfor the author’s own words runs the risk of misinterpreting the meaning ofthe words in the original document. It was for this reason that he preferredusing index terms extracted from the document itself [8, § 114].

Whereas Otlet and Kaiser were in substantial agreement on both thedesirability of information analysis and its technological implementation inthe form of the card system, they parted company on the question of howindex files were to be organized. Both men favored organizing informationunits by subject, but differed as to the type of KO framework that shouldgovern file sequence: Otlet favored filing according to the classificatory orderof the UDC, whereas Kaiser favored filing according to the alphabeticalorder of the terms used to denote subjects