IS 550

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Credit: 4 hours.

A theory of information attempts to articulate clearly and precisely what information is, and what it means to become informed. Theories of information can contribute to the scientific foundations for many important research and practice activities in IS, including data curation, information modeling, information access, digital preservation, and informatics support for science and scholarship. This course, Theories of Information -- A, takes a logic-based approach to investigating the nature of information. Methodologically we draw from a family of methods that might be called formal methods, in contrast to the empirical methods of social and nature science. Formal methods typically make use of concepts from logic, set theory, and discrete mathematics to construct and explore formal systems. Formal methods are widely used in linguistics, mathematics, philosophy, and computer science. Within the general area of formal methods our approach in this course might be more specifically referred to as conceptual analysis, as it takes the form of a systematic analysis of a concept, namely information. Most of the prior work that is relevant to our analysis is from analytic philosophy, linguistics (especially formal semantics), and computer science (especially knowledge representation and AI).

Prerequisite: Some familiarity with formal logic would be useful, but is not required. Some familiarity with conceptual modeling (ER or UML diagrams, or RDF/S for instance) would also be useful, but not required.

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