The basic concept of informatics is information. Any human activity is the process of collecting and processing information, making decisions based on it and implementing them. With the advent of modern means of computer technology, information has become one of the most important resources of scientific and technological progress. According to modern concepts, information is one of the initial categories of the universe, along with matter and energy. These categories are closely interconnected with each other. Communication, exchange of information are inherent to all living beings, but especially to human beings. Being accumulated and processed from certain positions, information provides new information and leads to new knowledge. Obtaining information from the surrounding world, its analysis and generation is one of the main functions of a human being, which distinguishes him/her from the rest of the living world. Category connections can be seen both in nature and in the processes generated by man. The progress of humankind inevitably leads to an increase in the total amount of information at its disposal, which grows much faster than the world's population and its material needs.
Information is contained in human speech, books, magazines, newspapers, radio and television reports, instrument readings, etc. A person perceives information with the help of the senses. Stores and processes it with the help of the brain and central nervous system. Transmitted information usually concerns some objects or ourselves and is connected with the events taking place in the world around us. How is the information measured?
It is difficult to define the concept of "amount of information". There are two main approaches to solving this problem. Historically, they have emerged almost simultaneously. In the late 1940s, one of the founders of cybernetics, the American mathematician Claude Shannon, developed a probabilistic approach to measuring the amount of information, and the development of computers led to a "three-dimensional" approach.
Information, information processes and systems
The concepts of "information", "information process" and "information system" are fundamental in the course of computer science, so their formation has been and remains a complex problem, primarily related to different worldviews of individual authors and representatives of various scientific directions and schools. Information as a scientific category is a subject of study in many scientific disciplines: philosophy, informatics, physics, biology, etc.
There are many different definitions of the concept of "information", but none of them can be accepted as the main one, because all of them reflect only certain properties of information, which can be attributed to:
- Dualism is a property of information that characterizes its duality. On the one hand, it is objective, because it does not depend on the perceived object, and on the other - subjective, because it can be interpreted by subjects in different ways;
- reliability is a property of information, which characterizes the degree of correspondence of information to a real object with a given accuracy;
- adequacy - property of information, which establishes the correspondence of the image created with the help of information to the real object, process or phenomenon, etc.
This series of properties of information can be continued. However, the most important thing to note here is the following: the set of properties of information characterizing the degree of its compliance with the needs of users is called the quality of information.
As already noted, the concept of information can be considered under various restrictions imposed on its properties, i.e. under different levels of consideration. Basically, there are three levels - syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. Correspondingly, different assessments are used to determine the amount of information at each of them.
Syntactic level
At the syntactic level, probabilistic methods are used to estimate the amount of information, which take into account only the probabilistic properties of the information and do not take into account others (semantic content, usefulness, relevance, etc.). Mathematical and, in particular, probabilistic methods developed in the middle of the XX century allowed to form an approach to the evaluation of the amount of information as a measure of reducing the uncertainty of knowledge.