Informational Facts and the Metainformation Inherent in IFacts: The Soul of Data Sciences
Robert M. Losee · Journal of Library Metadata · 2013
Books, archives, and media contain information and meaning, and much of what librarians and information scientists focus on are these information vessels. Metadata is normally assigned to such vessels to assist in organizing and retrieving the information vessels. Facts are often derived from these information vessels through text mining, but facts may be directly produced from observations. A particular kind of fact, an informational fact (IFact), describes the information from the observation of an information producing process. Such IFacts will become a major part of future data libraries. Metainformation, a kind of metadata, is associated with these IFacts, describing the empirical characteristics of the observation that produced the IFact. This metainformation is inherent in informational facts, and is critical in the use of scientific datasets and “big data.” The differences between regular facts and informational facts are examined, as well as between metadata and metainformation.