Article Preview
TopFundamental Concepts
The perception of information1 not only influences our view of information, but also our perception of information system (Klein & Hirschleim, 1987), our perception of communication (Mokros, 1993, Schement, 1993) and the conduct of research (Newman, 2001, Schement 1993). This means that the perception of information, which we prefer to call information concepts, have a profound influence in the field of information science.
The information concept fascinates many scientists from different fields such as biology, psychology, computer science, sociology, economics, management, political science, statistics, philosophy, communication and information studies (Mokros, 1993, Newman, 2001, Ruben 1993, Schement, 1993). In all these fields the information is an important concept, but at the same time none of them can claim the information as being relevant only for them.
the information should be viewed as an interdisciplinary concept. This means that the concepts of information must be studied in different disciplines. It also means that the concepts of information are not only relevant in the field of information science.
On the concept of inter-disciplinarily of information no deal has emerged, and no unifying theory is presented as imminent (Schement, 1993). When information is defined “the abundance and diversity confuse us” (Braman, 1989, p. 233).
A tempting conclusion that we reached is that the meaning of information depends on the context. While many argue that we need a theoretical perspective of information (Devlin, 1999, Aefiner, 1999, Newman, 2001).
We do not intend to define a theoretical perspective, but only present the different concepts in different disciplines, as well as a critical analysis of the different concepts. Newman (2001) describes a variety of concepts in different sciences that can be grouped as follows:
- •
Probabilistic concept;
- •
Concept of information processing;
- •
Ecological concept of info;
- •
Social and organizational concept of information.
The probabilistic concept of information is that low-probability events represent high information content. An important application of this concept is the information theory Shannon and Weaver (1949, in Newman, 2001).
In this theory the mathematical representation of the transmission of a message is presented as if the information was a measure of predictability. Logic, cybernetics and philosophy also correlate the information with the probability (Fisher, 1934, Carnap & Bar-Hillel, 1952, Popper, 1965, Mackay, 1969 in: Newman, 2001).
But these concepts differ in important ways, as for example, in the interpretation of probability and on the semantics of the information. With respect to the semantics of the information, many concepts see the information as reduction of uncertainty.