Features associated with information
This is adapted from previous email discussion following the First IAO workshop, starting an effort to build an Information Artifact Ontology.
Features associated with information
- Amplification
- The potential for remote control, action at a distance via communication of various kinds.
- Preservation over time
- Small occupation on space of possibilities - related to the Shannon sense of information.
- Low noise / perfect copyability
- Formulated in a background language marked by
- Compositionality, which involves also a high degree of
- Free associability (providing I follow the rules of grammar (or analogous rules in music?) I have a gigantic degree of freedom to create new things which are still language)
- A distinction between the grammatical and the non-grammatical (between the well-formed and the ill-formed), resting on widespread consensus
- substitutability of synonyms (thus an idea of shared meaning -- whereby it is meaning which gets communicated)
- Aboutness (every information artifact is intended to be about something)
- Potential for logical complexity; narrative objects (e.g. journal articles) always have this.
- Potential for normativity (some information artifacts convey oughtness, also governed by logic and aboutness)
- A certain pattern of interactions among players in an evolutionary setting - Ask Jonathan Rees to make this more precise.
- Being informative - Jonathan: that which informs
From these we might select from this list to be the building blocks of definitions of Information Artifact or Information Resource
