History
There are, and have been historically, a lot of similar things to what Derivation aspires to be. Connecting knowledge with other knowledge is what makes knowledge; knowledge. If a piece of knowledge stands completely alone, it would not have any relation or reference to anything and would therefore be meaningless to us.
The Great Chain of Being
Pictured is a 16th-century visualization of the Great Chain of Being; an idea of how everything in reality, all life and matter, would be structured hierarchically. The Christian version of it put God on top, but the concept dates back to Classical Antiquity. Similar hierarchical ways of sorting life continued beyond the Middle Ages, although in different shapes.
The Encyclopédie
The first systematic attempt to create such an integrated world knowledge system was the 18th-century Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert.
Pictured is the structure for knowledge that the Encyclopédie used, called "the figurative system of human knowledge". The major sets are Memorie (Memory), mainly focused on Historie (History), Raison (Reason), mainly focused on Philosophie (Philosophy) and Imagination, mainly about Poesie (Poetry). The categorization and overall structuring are a way of systematization and the relational cross-references within articles about topics to others.
Modern Precursors
By the late 19th century, there was too much knowledge to fit into a single volume. To deal with this, Paul Otlet started what's now known as information science. In the 1930s, he imagined a system similar to the internet, where documents and communication networks would be connected, allowing anyone to access all the world's knowledge. Around the same time, H. G. Wells had a similar idea — a world encyclopedia that a global university-like institution would constantly update. He called this the "World Brain", envisioning it as a global memory.
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, was inspired by how the brain connects different kinds of information. He thought computers would be way more powerful if they could do the same — linking any piece of information to another. He proposed the Semantic Web, a system that would make these links between information understandable by machines, giving the network some ability to interpret or reason on its own.
Contemporary Systems
A more recent similar idea is the Tree of Knowledge system, which has the aim of depicting the evolution of complexity using Matter, Life, Mind, and Culture as phases, or dimensions. From their site: "It is a theory of scientific knowledge that defines the human knower in relation to the known. It achieves this novel accomplishment by solving the problem of psychology and giving rise to a truly consilient view of the scientific landscape. It accomplishes this via dividing the evolution of behavioral complexity into four different planes of existence. Life, Mind, and Culture emerge out of the dimensions beneath them as a function of complexity building feedback loops that are self-organizing and mediated by novel systems of information processing and communication. The ToK also characterizes modern empirical natural science as a kind of justification system that functions to map complexity and change."
More recent examples include Neo4j, WolframAlpha, Sana Labs, and various systematizations concerning big data.
Today, Wikipedia is in many regards the closest thing we have to Derivation. It combines the linking power of the web with the collective knowledge of millions of contributors, approaching a global memory. It, however, does a lot more for the democratization of knowledge, than for the systematization of it. For Derivation, especially in early stages, it's secondary to store the knowledge on the site (particulary when considering the incredible amount of it), but rather systematize the logical relations between knowledge units, and referring to the knowledge elsewhere.
The Derivation Project Timeline
Early speculations of what came to be Derivation were started in early 2022, and the name "Derivation" was coined that autumn. The first (Swedish) presentation was made in February 2023, and, the English version in April. The Discord server was created in June and the theory document in September. At a point when too much time had been spent on things that are not praxis; the Coda was made in October, aiming to focus on concrete achievements. A non-profit organization for the development of Derivation was founded in June of 2025. This website was first made online in August of 2025.