A New Framework for Shannon Information Theory
Gerard Allwein, Ira S. Moskowitz, LiWu Chang · 2004
Barwise and Seligman proposed a very general qualitative theory of information flow (in distributed systems) while Shannon proposed a very general quantitative theory for communication flow. The two kinds of flow are not synonymous, with information flow being the more general of the two. We synthesize a new theory from these two theories so that qualitative and quantitative analysis use the same theory structures. The main advantages are (1) Shannon theory gets a more expressive framework within which to operate, (2) Barwise/Seligman theory gets to take advantage of quantitative mechanisms. The resultant theory has direct applications to many areas that use information theory.