On the Notion of Information – Info-sphere, the World of Formations
András Benczúr, Bálint Molnár · 2018
Information has central role in many areas of our life. Recent development of information technologies and computation extended our capability to collect, analyze, distribute, process and utilize information. Information became one of the most important notion of our era. Still, there is no agreement on its definition. Computation and the digital communications has brought dramatic changes on our notion of information. It is commonly agreed that information has real, physically observable patterns, what is something that can be sensed, observed, and altered. We shall name the patterns of information as formation. The association of the referent, the meaning of formation, is a real process developing in space and time. We name it an information event. It is given by a triplet of the owner (or observer), the formation and the referent. Using this elementary building block of information, we characterize the new era in the evolution of mankind's infosphere. Today, the new component of the infosphere, that contains the majority of the permanent formations is the Digital Universe. The origin of formal information theories is closely related to randomness and uncertainty. In the presentation, our second goal is to give a new light on the role and importance of probabilistic and algorithmic information theory. Extended their power via computation, they play important role in communication and cognition processes. At the end we conclude to the claim that informatics as a science, is the science of the infosphere.