What Is Information Science?

Information science is a science that studies the laws and application methods of information movement. It is an emerging comprehensive science formed by the infiltration and combination of information theory, cybernetics, computer theory, artificial intelligence theory, and system theory. Its pillars are information theory, systems theory, and cybernetics.

Information technology is a type of technology that can expand the function of human information organs.

Chinese name: information Science
Foreign name: Information Science

Pinyin: xìn x k xué
Zhuyin

Information Science Definition

(1) Information technology refers to a class of technologies that can perform functions such as information acquisition, transmission, processing, regeneration, and application.

(2) Information technology refers to the whole of sensing, communication, computer and intelligence, and control technologies. ^[1]

Information science refers to an emerging comprehensive discipline with information as the main research object, information movement rules and application methods as the main research content, computer and other technologies as the main research tools, and the main goal of expanding human information functions. .

Information is a sign of matter, energy, information and its attributes; information is an increase in certainty. Information is a collection of things phenomena and their attributes. [2006, Medical Information (Journal), Deng Yu, etc.].

Taking information as the main research object is one of the most fundamental characteristics that distinguishes information science from other sciences, and it is also the most fundamental premise that information science can become an independent discipline.

In the ontological sense, information is the state and way of (moving state) of things; in the epistemological sense, it is the state and way of things that are perceived or expressed by the subject. "Things" can be either the actual objects of the external world or the spiritual phenomena of the subjective world. "Motion" can be either the displacement of an object in space or a change in all senses. Refers to the behavior and state of things in a specific time and space, and "the way of movement" refers to the patterns and rules of things that change with time and space.

First, information is a common type of research object.

Second, information and matter are two concepts that are both connected and different.

Third, information and energy are two concepts that are both connected and different.

Fourth, human beings must obtain information to understand things, and they must also have information to change things.

· Since information is necessary for people to understand things (the world) and change things (the world), in order to better fulfill the mission of understanding the world and transforming the world, it is necessary to study the information problem in depth.

Since information is a common type of research object, people's research on information issues has universal significance.

Since information is not the same as matter or energy, the study of information issues naturally becomes an independent discipline. ^[1]

Basic theory of information science

Information science

Information theory is the forerunner of information science. It is a science that uses mathematical statistics to study the laws of measurement, transmission, and exchange of information. It mainly studies the common laws of information transmission in communication and control systems, and establishes the best solution to information. The basic theory of acquisition, measurement, transformation, storage, transfer and other issues. ^[2]

Information Science Cybernetics

The founder of cybernetics is American scientist Wiener. In 1948, he published the book Cybernetics, which explicitly proposed two basic concepts of cybernetics-information and feedback, and revealed the laws of information and control. Cybernetics is the science of control and communication in animals and machines. It studies the common control laws of various systems. Functional simulation and black box methods are widely used in cybernetics. The control system is essentially a feedback control system. Negative feedback is an important means to achieve control and make the system work stably. In cybernetics, the control of the system is achieved through information feedback. In the course of formulating guidelines and policies, the decisions of Harvard managers can be regarded as the feedback control process of information transformation and information processing.

Information Science System Theory

The basic idea of system theory is to integrate all elements in the system for comprehensive investigation and coordination, so as to optimize the whole. The holistic principle is its starting point, and the hierarchical structure and dynamic principle are its core of research; comprehensive and orderly is its essence. System theory is a large organization management technology widely used in the national economy.

Information Science Research Content

Information Science Project

Information science is taking shape and developing rapidly, and there is no unified understanding of the scope of its research content. The main research topics now focus on the following six areas:

Source theory and information acquisition, research on natural and social information sources, and methods and techniques for extracting information from information sources;
Information transmission, storage, retrieval, transformation and processing;
Measurement, analysis, processing and display of signals;
Pattern information processing, research on the processing, classification and recognition of text, image, sound and other information, and develop machine vision systems and speech recognition devices;
Knowledge information processing, researching the representation, acquisition and utilization of knowledge, and establishing a knowledge information processing system, that is, an expert system with the ability to reason and automatically solve problems;
Decision-making and control, based on the collection, analysis, processing, identification and understanding of information, to make judgments, decisions or controls, so as to establish various control systems, management information systems and decision support systems.

Information science topics

1. Optical communication technology: the basic concepts of optical communication, the development trend of optical communication, the significance and application of optical communication.

2. Communication and Information System: introduce the basic concepts of communication and information system, the application fields of communication and information system, the history and latest development of communication and information system, etc.

3. Physical electronics and nanotechnology: the relationship between electronics and physics, nanomaterial technology, nanoelectronics, nanocharacterization technology, etc.

4. Wireless communication technology: the basic concept of wireless communication, the development status and trends of wireless communication, etc.

5. Quantum electronics and laser technology: basic knowledge, development history and current status of quantum electronic devices, application fields of quantum electronics, etc.

6. Computer software: introduce the concept of computer software, the main research content of computer software, the development trend of computer software, software engineering

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7. Computer architecture: the basic concept of computer architecture, the development history, status quo and trend of computer architecture.

8. Computer network and information system: the basic concept of computer network, the basic knowledge of computer network, the main role of computer network.

information Science 9. Digital multimedia technology: The basic knowledge and standards of digital media technology, as well as the status and future of development at home and abroad.

Development of Information Science

In the late 1940s, American mathematician Shannon published two well-known papers, "The Mathematical Theory of Communication" and "Communication in Noise," and proposed mathematical formulas for information entropy, describing the transmission and extraction of information from a quantitative perspective. Problem, created information theory. So information theory was first widely used in communication engineering, which laid a preliminary foundation for the research of information science.

With the emergence of automated systems and automatic control theory, research on information has begun to break through the concept of being limited to transmission. American mathematician Wiener published the famous "Cybernetics" and "Extrapolation, Interpolation and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series" during this period, revealing the common information and control laws of animals and machines from the perspective of control. The signal processing problem of extracting useful information from the signal obliterated by noise using filtering and prediction methods is established, and the Wiener filtering theory is established.

In the 1960s, due to the emergence of complex engineering large systems that required computers to control the production process, system identification became an important research topic. From the perspective of information science, system identification is to study the behavior and internal structure of the control system through input and output information, and use a concise mathematical model to represent it. Control is the processing, transformation and utilization of information according to the system structure and requirements.

information Science Information and control are the foundation and core of information science. Since the 1970s, the development of television, data communications, remote sensing, and biomedical engineering has brought a lot of research topics to information science, such as information processing and transmission technologies such as information compression, enhancement, and restoration. Information feature extraction, classification, and identification Patterns, recognition theories and methods, practical image processing and pattern recognition systems have emerged.

Shannon's original theory of information only described information quantitatively, without considering other aspects of the information, such as the semantics and utility of the information. At this time, information theory has penetrated from the original communication field to the fields of automatic control, information processing, systems engineering, artificial intelligence, etc. This requires more in-depth research on the nature of information, the semantics and utility of information, etc. The establishment of more general theories has led to information science.

In order to solve the non-numerical problems in control and decision-making, and to meet the needs of intelligent machine research after the 1980s, as well as to solve the problem of knowledge information processing, knowledge engineering has been produced and has been developed into expert systems, natural language understanding systems, and intelligence. Robots, etc.

Significance of Information Science

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information Science Information science is an inevitable product of the information age. Information science is an emerging interdisciplinary science, which takes information as its main research object.

Information science research includes: clarifying the concept and nature of information (philosophical information theory); discussing the measurement and transformation of information (basic information theory); researching the method of extracting information (identifying information theory); clarifying the information transmission law (communication theory); probing Information processing mechanism (intelligence theory); Exploring information regeneration theory (decision theory); clarifying the information adjustment principle (control theory); perfecting the organization theory of information (system theory).

Expanding human information organ functions and improving human's ability to receive and process information is essentially expanding and enhancing people's ability to understand and transform the world. This is both the starting point of information science and its final destination. Information technology includes communication technology, computer technology, multimedia technology, automatic control technology, video technology, and remote sensing technology. Communication technology is an important part of modern information technology. The digitization, broadband, high speed and intelligence of communication technology are the development trends of modern communication technology. Computer technology is another important part of information technology. Since its birth, computers have been processing a large amount of information for people, and with the continuous development of computers, its ability to process information has been continuously strengthened. Computers have infiltrated every aspect of people's social life. Computers will move towards parallel processing. Modern information technology cannot be separated from computer technology for a moment. Multimedia technology is a technology that only emerged in the 1980s. It comprehensively processes text, data, graphics, language and other information through computers, so that people can obtain more comprehensive and intuitive comprehensive information. Multimedia technology will play a very important role in the future. A large part of information technology processing is images and text, so video technology is also a research hotspot of information technology.

The development of information science and technology not only promotes the development of the information industry, but also greatly improves production efficiency. Facts have proved that the widespread application of information science and technology has been a huge driving force for economic development. Therefore, the competition in information technology in various countries is also very fierce, and they are all competing for the commanding heights of information technology.

Information Science Machine Intelligence

The following summarizes the latest research status and results of machine intelligence, especially machine perception, and looks forward to its future research directions.

Intelligent information processing technology: mainly introduces computational intelligence, intelligent information processing, intelligent perception and target recognition technology, data mining and knowledge discovery technology.

Signal and Information Processing: Introduce the basic concepts of signal and information processing, the application fields of signal and information processing, the development history, current status and future of signal and information processing.

Micro-electro-mechanical systems: the basic concepts of micro-electro-mechanical systems, the introduction of several important micro-electro-mechanical system components, the development status and trends of micro-electro-mechanical systems.

Microelectronics and integrated circuit technology: basic concepts of microelectronics, history of microelectronics science and technology development, basic concepts of microelectronics, the importance of microelectronics in the national economy, microelectronics science and technology and industrial development trends .

Information processes generally exist in various fields such as biology, society, industry, agriculture, national defense, scientific experiments, daily life, and human thinking, so information science will have a huge impact on engineering technology, socioeconomics, and human life.