On the Infological Interpretation of Information

Introduction

Information is one of the most fascinating concepts present in theoretical discussions and practical projects. There are different proposals of its definition and interpretation. As an example one can mention the following concepts:

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  Claud Shannon’s theory of information (Shannon 1948).

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  Non-probabilistic theory of Andriej N. Kolmogorov (1969).

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  The theory of Ralph L. Hartley (1928) describing the information quantity in a set.

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  Quality theory of information by Marian Mazur (1970).

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  Pragmatic theory of information by Klemens Szaniawski (1971).

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  Semantic interpretation of information proposed by Józef Olenski (2001).

A common character of these approaches is the fact that all of them actually describe some selected aspects of information (e.g. its quantity) and don’t explain what information is. One can find a long list of proposals in this area but all of them are biased with the field of interested of the authors. To prove this, we cite two known definitions of information:

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  (NorbertWiener, 1954, p. 17): „Information is a name for the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it, and makes our adjustment felt upon it”.

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  (GlynnHarmon, 1984, p. 193): „(...) information as metaenergy – a very minute amount of energy that regulates larger amounts of energy in and among various kinds of biological or physical systems”.

This is why, still there is a need of looking for a satisfactory definition of this concept. In this chapter, a proposition of so-called infological interpretation of information is presented. The concept was formulated by Bo Sundgren (1973) in his publication devoted to data bases. Sundgren developed a consistent theory of a model of data base based on the concept of message as a specific set of data.

The model inspires to look for a new interpretation of information, and is a good source of manifold analysis of the concept.