Information

Any natural process that is not completely random and any observable pattern in any medium can be said to convey some amount of information.

In a digital signal, bits may be interpreted into the symbols, letters, numbers, or structures that convey the information available at the next level up.

[citation needed] Information can be transmitted in time, via data storage, and space, via communication and telecommunication.

[7] The English word "information" comes from Middle French enformacion/informacion/information 'a criminal investigation' and its etymon, Latin informatiō(n) 'conception, teaching, creation'.

The field itself was fundamentally established by the work of Claude Shannon in the 1940s, with earlier contributions by Harry Nyquist and Ralph Hartley in the 1920s.

In their opinion, the change in the essence of the concept of information occurs after various breakthrough technologies for the transfer of experience (knowledge), i.e. the appearance of writing, the printing press, the first encyclopedias, the telegraph, the development of cybernetics, the creation of a microprocessor, the Internet, smartphones, etc.

[11] Applications of fundamental topics of information theory include source coding/data compression (e.g. for ZIP files), and channel coding/error detection and correction (e.g. for DSL).

Its impact has been crucial to the success of the Voyager missions to deep space, the invention of the compact disc, the feasibility of mobile phones and the development of the Internet.

The theory has also found applications in other areas, including statistical inference,[12] cryptography, neurobiology,[13] perception,[14] linguistics, the evolution[15] and function[16] of molecular codes (bioinformatics), thermal physics,[17] quantum computing, black holes, information retrieval, intelligence gathering, plagiarism detection,[18] pattern recognition, anomaly detection[19] and even art creation.

The cognitive scientist and applied mathematician Ronaldo Vigo argues that information is a concept that requires at least two related entities to make quantitative sense.

The sequence of nucleotides is a pattern that influences the formation and development of an organism without any need for a conscious mind.

However, the existence of unicellular and multicellular organisms, with the complex biochemistry that leads, among other events, to the existence of enzymes and polynucleotides that interact maintaining the biological order and participating in the development of multicellular organisms, precedes by millions of years the emergence of human consciousness and the creation of the scientific culture that produced the chemical nomenclature.

In this practice, tools and processes are used to assist a knowledge worker in performing research and making decisions, including steps such as: Stewart (2001) argues that transformation of information into knowledge is critical, lying at the core of value creation and competitive advantage for the modern enterprise.

When Marshall McLuhan speaks of media and their effects on human cultures, he refers to the structure of artifacts that in turn shape our behaviors and mindsets.

[29] The total amount of data created, captured, copied, and consumed globally is forecast to increase rapidly, reaching 64.2 zettabytes in 2020.

Essentially, records are information produced consciously or as by-products of business activities or transactions and retained because of their value.

Willis expressed the view that sound management of business records and information delivered "...six key requirements for good corporate governance...transparency; accountability; due process; compliance; meeting statutory and common law requirements; and security of personal and corporate information.

Signs themselves can be considered in terms of four inter-dependent levels, layers or branches of semiotics: pragmatics, semantics, syntax, and empirics.

Semantics can be considered as the study of the link between symbols and their referents or concepts – particularly the way that signs relate to human behavior.

Syntax as an area studies the form of communication in terms of the logic and grammar of sign systems.

The existence of information about a closed system is a major concept in both classical physics and quantum mechanics, encompassing the ability, real or theoretical, of an agent to predict the future state of a system based on knowledge gathered during its past and present.

[38] Quantum physics instead encodes information as a wave function, which prevents observers from directly identifying all of its possible measurements.

Prior to the publication of Bell's theorem, determinists reconciled with this behavior using hidden variable theories, which argued that the information necessary to predict the future of a function must exist, even if it is not accessible for humans; A view surmised by Albert Einstein with the assertion that "God does not play dice".

Information visualization (shortened as InfoVis) depends on the computation and digital representation of data, and assists users in pattern recognition and anomaly detection.

Information quality (shortened as InfoQ) is the potential of a dataset to achieve a specific (scientific or practical) goal using a given empirical analysis method.