Informatics
Encyclopedia : I : IN : INF : Informatics
- Not to be confused with Information science.
Informatics studies the structure, behaviour, and interactions of natural and artificial systems that store, process and communicate information. It also develops its own conceptual and theoretical foundations. Since computers, individuals and organizations all process information, informatics has computational, cognitive and social aspects.
Used as a compound, in conjunction with the name of a discipline, as in medical informatics, bio-informatics, etc., it denotes the specialization of informatics to the management and processing of data, information and knowledge in the named discipline.
Informatics should not be confused with information theory, the mathematical study of the concept of information, or Library and information science a field related to libraries and related information fields.
Etymology
The French term informatique, was coined in 1962 by Dreyfus (Dreyfus, Phillipe. ‘L’informatique.’ Gestion, Paris, Juin 1962, pp. 240—1), together with various translations — informatics (English — also proposed independently, and at the same time, by [Walter F.Bauer]), informatik (German), and informatica (Italian, Spanish), referring to the application of computers to store and process information.
The term was coined as a combination of "information" and "automation", to describe the science of automatic information processing. The morphology — informat-ion + -ics, uses ‘the accepted form for names of sciences, as conics, linguistics, optics, or matters of practice, as economics, politics, tactics’ (Oxford English Dictionary 1989), and so, linguistically, the meaning extends easily to encompass both the science of information and the practice of information processing.
This new term was adopted across Western Europe, and, except in English, developed a meaning roughly translated by the English ‘computer science’, or ‘computing science’. Mikhailov et al. advocated the Russian term ‘informatika’ (1966), and the English ‘informatics’ (1967), as names for the theory of scientific information, and argued for a broader meaning, including study of the use of information technology in various communities (e.g. scientific) and of the interaction of technology and human organizational structures.
- Informatics is the discipline of science which investigates the structure and properties (not specific content) of scientific information, as well as the regularities of scientific information activity, its theory, history, methodology and organization.
- :(Mikhailov, A.I., Chernyl, A.I., and Gilyarevskii, R.S. (1966) Informatika – novoe nazvanie teorii naučnoj informacii. Naučno tehničeskaja informacija, 12, pp 35—9.)
Informatics is a registered trademark [link] in the United States, a fact which prevented the Association for Computing Machinery from becoming the Society for Informatics.
A broad interpretation of informatics, as "the study of the structure, behaviour, and interactions of natural and artificial computational systems," was introduced by the University of Edinburgh in 1994 when it formed the grouping that is now the School of Informatics. This meaning is now (2006) increasingly used in the United Kingdom for example, at [Sussex], [City University], [Bangor], [Ulster], [Bradford], and [Newcastle]. It encompasses the study of systems that represent, process, and communicate information, including all computational, cognitive and social aspects. The central notion is the transformation of information — whether by computation or communication, whether by organisms or artifacts. In this sense, informatics can be considered as encompassing computer science, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, information science and related fields, and as extending the scope of computer science to encompass computation in natural, as well as engineered, computational systems.
At the Indiana University School of Informatics, informatics is defined as "the art, science and human dimensions of information technology" and "the study, application, and social consequences of technology." These definitions are widely accepted in the United States, and differ from British usage in omitting the study of natural computation.
In the English-speaking world the term informatics was first widely used in the compound, ‘medical informatics’, taken to include ‘the cognitive, information processing, and communication tasks of medical practice, education, and research, including information science and the technology to support these tasks’ (Greenes, R.A. and Shortliffe, E.H. (1990) Medical Informatics: An emerging discipline with academic and institutional perspectives. Journal of the American Medical Association, 263(8) pp.1114—20.). Many such compounds are now in use; they can be viewed as different areas of applied informatics.
Contributing Disciplines
See also
- Bioinformatics
- Cheminformatics
- Geoinformatics
- Health informatics
- Laboratory informatics
- Neuroinformatics
- Social informatics
External links
- [Answers.com]: Alternate definitions of the word informatics
- [informatics]: entry from International Encyclopedia of Information and Library Science
- [Software History Center]: First usage of informatics in the US
- [What is Informatics at Edinburgh?]
- [What does informatics mean?]
- [Prior Art Database]: Informatics: An Early Software Company
- [Forum] for Informatics and Computer Science Students
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.