Tags / 72 quotes from 43 sources
#information
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Nanopublications
A nanopublication is the smallest unit of publishable information: an assertion about anything that can be uniquely identified and attributed to its author. Individual nanopublications can be cited by others and tracked for their impact on the community. Nanopublications are a…
Adesso basta (Simone Perotti)
Senza tempo per informarsi
Non avete quasi mai tempo per informarvi bene, per leggere giornali, riviste, vedere programmi diversi da quelli della fascia oraria serale, dunque la vostra opinione si forma in modo superficiale, quasi sempre sui sentito dire, mai in modo approfondito e attingendo a fonti…
Automatic Heritage Metadata Enrichment With Historic Events | Museumsandtheweb.com
Enriching museum metadata with historical events
Most digitized and online available objects from GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) can be browsed through a predefined set of formal metadata, such as its creator, year of creation, and type of material. Standards for metadata management and exchange enable…
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
Consciousness is a useful hallucination
Neither brains nor computers carry out computations. Consciousness is a hallucination, albeit a very useful one. And information is an epistemic tool that is a cultural invention rather than a natural entity. Some philosophers, like David Chalmers, argue that the brain doesn’t…
The ontology of the digital
There is a strange relationship between digital ideology and the metaphysical belief that our brains also run as computations. It is as if one belief justifies the other. It would indeed be very convenient for Google if it turns out that creating artificial intelligence is just…
Computations are not like gravity
“Historically, significant scientific progress has commonly been achieved in the absence of formal definitions. For instance, the phenomenological laws of electrical current flow were formulated by Ohm, Ampere, and Volta well before the discovery of the electron in 1892 by…
Shannon and the birth of the bit
A binary digit can be in one of two states. And this is the basis of the “bit”—which is a shortening of “binary digit”: 0 or 1. The information contained in a bit is a measure of how likely it is that the digit is one or zero. With all the talk about infinity so far, it should…
The sentence that invented bits
the sentence that is responsible for the conceptual framework that gave rise to computing. Shannon writes, “If the base 2 is used the resulting units may be called binary digits, or more briefly bits.”
Consciousness as a fundamental force
gravity. In other words, consciousness in this theory is a fundamental force in the universe, instead of a phenomenon caused by lower-level physics. We say that gravity, for example, is a fundamental force in the universe and that it is not really composed of even more…
Tononi's integrated information theory
Another prominent theory is the integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness put forth by University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Giulio Tononi. This theory expands on the classical information theory of Claude Shannon and
Consciousness as integrated information
applies it to consciousness. In a nutshell, the idea is that the level of consciousness you have is related to how many possible states your brain could be in and how tightly integrated those states are. Consciousness is, according to the IIT, the same thing as the brain…
Information as resurgent Platonism
“I am aware that in this information-centered era, many scientists and philosophers are bamboozled by the idea that information lies at the bottom of reality. It is nothing more than a resurgence of Platonism supported by the social and economic power of computer science and…
Are computations real or epistemic tools?
In philosophy, cognitive science, and, more broadly speaking, in computer science, there is a divide between those who believe that computations underlie physical reality—and that human consciousness is made of information, reducible to information, or caused by it—and those…
Brain imaging's undefined computations
Within the more empirical fields of brain imaging and experimental cognitive neuroscience, the computational assumption is interwoven into most hypotheses about the brain. In fact, in almost every brain imaging study the concepts of information and computation are deployed…
Three kinds of information
Oxford professor of philosophy Luciano Floridi describes three flavors of the word information in modern science: “information as reality (e.g., as patterns of physical signals, which are neither true nor false), also known as ecological information; information about reality…
Information is like lift
The concept of information is useful; so is the concept of lift for flight. This does not mean that lift is real. Importantly, we do not include lift in fundamental physics because the phenomenon of lift is reducible to still more basic laws of physics like mass and gravity…
Computations have no ontological status
Manzotti suggests that there is actually no such thing as information. Therefore, neither machines nor biologically based nervous systems can process it more efficiently—because information may not refer to anything. He argues that the computational level may be removed from…
Computers are like comic-book characters
one of the more counterintuitive parts to this argument is that computers themselves are not really performing computations. Manzotti argues that computers are simply “transferring electricity from one place to another and dissipating a huge amount of it. Computations and…
Börje Langefors - Wikipedia
Infological equation
A major achievement of his work is the formulation of the 'infological equation' describing the difference between data and information as follows: I = i(D, S, t) This is a mathematical expression for the observation, that the information "I" communicated by a set of data to…
Callimachus—avoiding The Pitfalls Of Xml For Collaborative Text Analysis
Annotation structures vs exploratory structures
Putting it another way, annotative projects are those in which the text is linked to external information, be it commentary, historical context, biographical details or any other class of supportive information. The primary research of such projects tends to be aimed at…
Core : Three Access Levels To Underpin Open Access
CORE extracts citation networks
CORE uses the ParsCit system to extract citation information from the publications full-‐text. This information is used in turn to check if the (cited) target documents are also present in the CORE aggregation to create a link between the cited publications. Within the…
Data - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
Information vs data
Beynon-Davies uses the concept of a sign to distinguish between data and information; data is a series of symbols, while information occurs when the symbols are used to refer to something.[5][6] It is people and computers who collect data and impose patterns on it. These…
Data-sharing: Everything On Display : Naturejobs
Why scientists don't share their data
Open data-sharers are still in the minority in many fields. Although many researchers broadly agree that public access to raw data would accelerate science — because other scientists might be able to make advances not foreseen by the data's producers — most are reluctant to…
Demystifying Networks
Problems with reductionism in the humanities
This reduction of data comes at a price, one that some argue traditionally divided the humanities and social sciences. If humanists care more about the differences than the regularities, more about what makes an object unique rather than what makes it similar, that is the very…
Dereferenceable Uniform Resource Identifier - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
Dereferenceable URIs are based on the well-established theory and practices of "data access by reference"
Because of the nature of a URI, it can be dereferenced to get the information of the thing it represents—hence the term dereferenceable URI. SSN and a person's name are not dereferenceable because, even though you could search for these strings on the Web, it is not guaranteed…
From Babel To Knowledge: Data Mining Large Digital Collections
Data mining as a new humanities method
These computational methods, which allow us to find patterns, determine relationships, categorize documents, and extract information from massive corpuses, will form the basis for new tools for research in the humanities and other disciplines in the coming decade.
Guidelines For The Construction, Format, And Management Of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies. American National Standards Institute
Knowledge organization system (kos)
The term knowledge organization systems is intended to encompass all types of schemes for organizing information and promoting knowledge management. Knowledge organization systems include classification schemes that organize materials at a general level (such as books on a…
Hamlet On The Holodeck
The networked computer
The networked computer acts like a telephone in offering one-to-one real-time communication, like a television in broadcasting moving pictures, like an auditorium in bringing groups together for lectures and discussions, like a library in offering vast amounts of textual…
Hierarchical Tags
The bat problem
The ‘Bat problem’ was coined by Japanese economist Yukio Noguchi to describe a problem which arises when classifying information and goods. Material things and information can have multiple attributes that are used descriptively depending on the context (Bats have the…
How Books Will Become Machines
Turning the web of documents into one database
Tim Berners-Lee and the other members of the W3C have been arguing for a long time about the importance of producing standards enabling semantic tagging and organization of information (Berners-Lee, 1999). The web is currently a web of documents. It should become a web of…
Ibm - What Is Data Quality? - Overview
Four qualities of high-quality data
Data quality is an essential characteristic that determines the reliability of data for making decisions. High-quality data is: Complete: All relevant data —such as accounts, addresses and relationships for a given customer—is linked. Accurate: Common data problems like…
Information - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
Information does not require a conscious mind to perceive, much less appreciate, the pattern
Information is any type of pattern that influences the formation or transformation of other patterns. In this sense, there is no need for a conscious mind to perceive, much less appreciate, the pattern. Consider, for example, DNA. The sequence of nucleotides is a pattern that…
Information Science - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
Information science: a definition
Information science is that discipline that investigates the properties and behavior of information, the forces governing the flow of information, and the means of processing information for optimum accessibility and usability. It is concerned with that body of knowledge…
Introducing Artificial Intelligence (Henry Brighton and Howard Selina)
Distributed representations
The kinds of information processing performed by neural networks can differ fundamentally in nature from those found in symbolic systems. Representations are often distributed in the same way that processing can be distributed. A distributed representation is spread out across…
You can't point at a distributed representation
As a general rule, you can’t locate specific items of information by pointing your finger at part of a distributed representation in the same way that you can with a local representation.
Kmworld 2009 Conference Program
Site, page and metadata architecture
The objective of information architecture (IA) is to design how information is created, structured and labeled to ensure a user experience that facilitates users in achieving their goals by finding information or completing a task in the most efficient manner. It describes how…
Knowledge Graph - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
Knowledge graph (wikipedia)
The Knowledge Graph is a knowledge base used by Google to enhance its search engine's search results with semantic-search information gathered from a wide variety of sources. Knowledge Graph display was added to Google's search engine in 2012, starting in the United States…
Life, The Multiverse And Everything: An Introduction To The Ideas Of Humberto Maturana Interpreting Maturana
Maturana vs varela about symbolic/semantic explanation
By sticking to structural descriptions Maturana aims to empty out all other types of symbolic explanations. The starkness of Maturana's position is ameliorated by Varela (1981) who, while agreeing with Maturana that notions of purpose, information or code cannot play any…
Making A Clean Sweep Of Cultural Heritage
Errors in cultural heritage databases
Jonathan Maletic and Andrian Marcus estimate that about 5 percent or more of the information present in manually created databases is erroneous. 5 Many possible causes for errors exist. First, some errors are due to interpretation discrepancies: different people who en ter data…
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
Intrinsic versus derived intentionality
Where the mind is concerned we also need a distinction between original or intrinsic intentionality on the one hand and derived intentionality on the other. For example I have in my head information about how to get to San Jose. I have a set of true beliefs about the way to San…
The Chinese room threatened the citadel of functionalism
Forget about consciousness, which is scientifically irrelevant anyway. What matters about the mind is its capacity for information processing, and the modern computer at long last gives us the right model for understanding the information processing capacities of the mind. This…
Intentionality rather than information
Readers familiar with cognitive science will recognize that when we talk about intentionality we are discussing what in cognitive science is known as “information.” I prefer “intentionality” because “information” is systematically ambiguous between a genuinely…
Consciousness coordinates vast amounts of information
I will spell out the relations between consciousness and intentionality in chapter 9. For the moment, just this: one huge evolutionary advantage of human consciousness is that we can coordinate a large amount of intentionality (“information”) simultaneously in a single unified…
Philosophy Of Information - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
Information
According to Luciano Floridi, four kinds of mutually compatible phenomena are commonly referred to as "information": - Information about something (e.g. a train timetable) - Information as something (e.g. DNA, or fingerprints) - Information for something (e.g. algorithms or…
Raw Data - Wikipedia
Raw Data -Data vs Information
For example, a point-of-sale terminal (POS terminal, a computerized cash register) in a busy supermarket collects huge volumes of raw data each day about customers' purchases. However, this list of grocery items and their prices and the time and date of purchase does not yield…
Rdf Primer
RDF schemas describe rather than prescribe
One benefit of the RDF property-based approach is that it becomes easier to extend the use of property definitions to situations that might not have been anticipated in the original description. At the same time, this is a "benefit" which must be used with care, to insure that…
RDF is for applications, not display
RDF is intended for situations in which this information needs to be processed by applications, rather than being only displayed to people. RDF provides a common framework for expressing this information so it can be exchanged between applications without loss of meaning. RDF…
Applications needn't understand RDF to use it
RDF provides a way to make statements that applications can more easily process. An application cannot actually "understand" such statements, as noted already, any more than a database system "understands" terms like "employee" or "salary" in processing a query like SELECT NAME…
Intermediate URIrefs for structured values
Structured information like this is represented in RDF by considering the aggregate thing to be described (like John Smith's address) as a resource, and then making statements about that new resource. So, in the RDF graph, in order to break up John Smith's address into its…
Reification and the reification quad
RDF applications sometimes need to describe other RDF statements using RDF, for instance, to record information about when statements were made, who made them, or other similar information (this is sometimes referred to as "provenance" information). [...] RDF provides a…
Anyone can say anything about any resource
These examples also illustrate one of the basic architectural principles of the Web, which is that anyone should be able to freely add information about an existing resource, using any vocabulary they please [BERNERS-LEE98]. The examples further illustrate that the RDF…
RDF: metadata about things on the Web
The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a language for representing information about resources in the World Wide Web. It is particularly intended for representing metadata about Web resources, such as the title, author, and modification date of a Web page, copyright and…
Scholars' Lab: Future Possibilities For Prism
Capturing disagreement
How can experiments in collaborative markup capture uncommon or dissenting readings? The concept of crowdsourcing – and, really, the social internet in general – has proven highly adept at extracting majority opinions, at taking the pulse of a group of people. What is “liked”…
Strategic Reading, Ontologies, And The Future Of Scientific Publishing
Scientists scan more and read less
Just as the aim of channel surfing is not to find a program to watch, the goal of literature surfing, is not to find an article to read, but rather to find, assess, and exploit a range of information by scanning portions of many articles. This behavior is common among…
Scientists strive to avoid unnecessary reading
Scientists have always read strategically, working with many articles simultaneously to search, filter, compare, arrange, link, annotate, and analyze fragments of content.Now, however, two important trends are interacting to support and intensify the effectiveness of these…
The Cidoc Conceptual Reference Module: An Ontological Approach To Semantic Interoperability Of Metadata
Cultural heritage needs semantic interoperability
The creation of the World Wide Web has had a profound impact on the ease with which information can be distributed and presented. In the sequence, there has been an increasing interest from professionals, public and politicians to make publicly available the tremendous wealth…
The Curious Identity Of Michael Field And Its Implications For Humanities Research With The Semantic Web
An agenda for the humanities community working in the semantic web
What is important to note here is not that potential solutions already exist in the database and knowledge base communities, but that the humanities community is not engaging with these solutions on any significant scale. Rather, the humanities community is focused on building…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Why we think in stereotypes
Human beings think in terms of stereotypes, for good reasons. Without mental short cuts, we simply couldn’t get by. There is just too much information to process, and we often have to be quite crude as to how we filter it. But these generalisations are bound to lead us astray.
The Functional Art: An Introduction To Information Graphics And Visualization
Visualization as a form of information architecture
For my purposes in this book, information graphics and visualization is a form of information architecture. But how can we be more precise in describing the relationship between the branch and the trunk? [...] Among the most relevant disciplines is information design, defined…
The information explosion
Erich Schmidt, former CEO of Google, announced in a conference that between the beginning of time and 2003, humanity generated roughly five exabytes of data, whereas we now produce the same volume of bits every two days. "The information explosion is so profoundly larger than…
Infographics and visualization lie on a continuum
The second theme is the common nature of infographics and information visualization. Some professionals and academics have erected a sharp distinction between the two disciplines. According to them, infographics present information by means of statistical charts, maps, and…
Present, compare, organize, correlate
In other words: If we accept that an infographic is, at its core, a tool, what tasks is this one intended to help me with? Here is my personal list for the Brazilian defense graphic: 1. The graphic must present several variables—armed forces personnel, population to be…
The Limits Of The Digital Humanities, By Adam Kirsch | New Republic
Knowledge and information
T.S. Eliot said it best, "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"and I would add, Where is the information we have lost in data?
The Power Of Semantics
Publishers use semantics to enhance the core functions of their existing products (such as search, navigation/collections, and related content suggestions)
Silverchair’s Jake Zarnegar noted that, ‘Publishers use semantics to enhance the core functions of their existing products (such as search, navigation/collections, and related content suggestions); to assemble programmatically targeted new content products that are relevant to…
The Semantic Web
The Semantic Web (definition)
The Semantic Web is an extension of the current Web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.
The Semantic Web: An Introduction
The Semantic Web as a globally linked database
The Semantic Web is a mesh of information linked up in such a way as to be easily processable by machines, on a global scale. You can think of it as being an efficient way of representing data on the World Wide Web, or as a globally linked database. The Semantic Web was thought…
The Tao Of Topic Maps
A thesaurus is a network of related terms
A thesaurus, on the other hand, emphasizes other aspects of an index. It is basically a network of interrelated terms within a particular domain, and although it will often contain other information (such as definitions, examples of usage, etc.), the key feature of a thesaurus…
Scope vs facet
As mentioned above, scope should not be confused with facets. The two mechanisms are different and complementary. Whereas scope can be seen as a filtering mechanism that is based on properties of the topics, facets provide for filtering based on properties of the information…
The Value Of Data
Nanopublications and in silico discovery
We propose a new way to represent data, information and, in particular, assertions in the form of nanopublications. A nanopubli- cation is essentially the smallest unit of publication: a single assertion, associating two concepts by means of a predicate in machine- readable…
Towards A Core Ontology For Information Integration
information integration provides the basis for a rich “knowledge space” built on top of the basic web “data layer”
[...] Lorcan Dempsey described interoperability as “recombinant potential”. This phrase epitomizes the potential for interoperability mechanisms and architectures to integrate heterogeneous information across the internet commons. As articulated by Paul Ginsparg, information…
Where Are The Semantics In The Semantic Web?
Hardwiring knowledge into software
Machine usable content presumes that the machine knows what to do with information on the Web. One way for this to happen is for the machine to read and process a machine-sensible specification of the semantics of the information. This is a robust and very challenging approach…
Xml And Semantic Transparency
Xml doesn't allow blind interoperability
[..] we must reckon with the cold fact that XML does not of itself enable blind interchange or information reuse. XML may help humans predict what information might lie "between the tags" in the case of , but XML can only help. For an XML processor, and and are all equally (and…