Belkin Information Concepts For Information Science

Journal of Documentation
INFORMATION CONCEPTS FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE

N.J. BELKIN,
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PROGRESS IN DOCUMENTATION
N. J . BELKIN
Centre for Information Science, The City University,
St John Street, London EC1
INTRODUCTION
INFORMATION SCIENCE, or informatics,* has almost from its beginnings
been characterized by a seemingly inordinate self-consciousness, exemplified by
concern with its status vis-à-vis other disciplines, with its status as a science, and
with the significance of its objects of investigation and the goals of that investiga
tion. The bibliography by Port, 4 and the survey by Wellisch,5 of definitions of
information science, and the historical survey by Harmon, 6 all give substantial
evidence of this self-consciousness. Some aspects of this attitude are of course due
to the social and political problems facing any new discipline (or field of investi
gation aspiring to such status), such as indifference or hostility from the established
academic community, the fight for a share of limited research and development
funds, the inferiority complex associated with having no well-defined methods
of investigation in a social situation which requires them for acceptance, and so
on. Other aspects of this self-consciousness may, however, be more related to
strictly internal, 'scientific' concerns; that is, to problems within the theoretical
structure of information science which must be solved in order for substantial
progress in solving its practical problems to be made. This review surveys contri
butions to one such problem: the question of a suitable concept of information
for information science.
Most of the information concepts to be reviewed will be from contributions
devoted to just this question, rather than from contributions which attack some
other problem yet require, or imply, an information concept as well. Further
more, I shall tend to restrict detailed discussion to a relatively small number of
proposals which characterize schools of thought on this problem, choosing those
which are cither most detailed or which I consider to be most typical of the par
ticular approach. Afinalrestriction on the coverage is that I shall usually cite only
the most recent or best developed contribution of a series by any one author (or
group). These limitations have been imposed because the literature of information
science is littered with 'one-line' information definitions which can normally be
classified into one of a small number of types of information concepts, each of
which usually has some quite well-developed exemplar associated with a particu
lar author or group. In order fairly to judge the value of any information concept,
one needs access to the reasoning behind the proposal and some indications of its
possible consequences. Therefore, this review becomes a critical survey of ap-
* I shall use the former term in deference to established English language usage, although1
accepting2 that the scope of the field is that indicated by Mikhaĭlov, Chernyĭ, and Giliarevskiĭ,
Brookes, and Foskett3 in their discussions of 'informatics'.
Journal of Documentation, Vol. 34, No. 1, March 1978, pp. 55-85.
55
JOURNAL OF DOCUMENTATION Vol. 34, no. 1
proaches to an information concept for information science, with one or more
examples of each approach discussed in some detail, rather than an exhaustive
survey of the literature on information concepts for information science.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF AN INFORMATION CONCEPT

Before embarking on a survey of answers to some question, it is often a good idea
to ask whether the question itself makes sense, and, if so, in what ways an answer
to it would be useful. The question of information concepts or definitions for
information science has in fact been considered from this point of view by a
number of people, with varying answers. Goffman,7 for instance, feels that this
is not a useful line of inquiry, saying that because the term 'information' is used
in so many different contexts, a single precise definition encompassing all of its
aspects can in principle not be formulated. Thus, the science of information
which Goffman proposes is one which studies information related phenomena,
rather than information itself, and presumably all such phenomena, rather than
those limited to some particular social or phenomenological context. Others,
however, have for various reasons suggested that an information concept is in
fact necessary for information science.
Yovits and his colleagues,8,9 for instance, justify the necessity of an information
definition for information science on the grounds that only by defining appro
priate basic concepts can a science become effective. Yovits8 wishes for a 'true
information science' on the model of physics, where the definition of concepts
such as force or mass provides both the limiting context and the conceptual power
of the discipline. This justification is very heavily dependent upon a rather tradi
tional view of the philosophy of science; one that has perhaps been adequately
descriptive of some of the sciences, but which is not necessarily germane to the
social and behavioural sciences. Nevertheless, it is still a reasonable and reasonably
well-documented position.
Otten 10 has also argued for ' . . . the importance of a sound foundation and the
scientific approach for the development of a body of knowledge on what we
generally refer to as information' (p. 105). In his view this requires explication of
elementary phenomena and relations, in this case information being the basic
phenomenon. The implication, quite well put, is that the scientific method is
appropriate to the problem, and that for the scientific method to be applied to
this problem information itself must be understood in its basic manifestations.
Again, this position depends upon a traditional view of science, but is perhaps
extended beyond that of Yovits by allowing the possibility that more than one
information concept may be useful for a science of information.
Artandi11 has suggested that information concepts are necessary for informa
tion science on the grounds of their potential utility. That is, she understands
information science as being concerned with a complex communication system
which must be considered at several levels. Information concepts are then useful
in helping to isolate the various levels and in understanding the communication
process at each level. She also considers that information concepts could be useful
in integrating the various disparate activities of information science. An interest
ing aspect of her position is that it leads to several information concepts, each
appropriate to particular problems or levels of communication, as Otten 10 also
suggests.
Brookes12 has taken a quite different approach to this question, first specifying
56
March 1978 PROGRESS IN DOCUMENTATION
just what it is that information science is concerned with, then formalizing this
specification so that the aspects which need to be investigated can be made clear.
H e does this through his 'fundamental equation of information science':
∆I=(S + ∆S)-(S) (p. 48)
which defines the situation with which information science is concerned. That
is, an existing state of knowledge, (S), is affected b y some increment of informa
tion, (∆I), resulting in a new state of knowledge (S + ∆S). In order to solve the
problem of information science, each element of the equation must be under
stood (including the operations), thus it is necessary to have a concept of informa
tion in order to understand the fundamental equation.
Mikhaĭlov, Chernyĭ, and Giliarevskiĭ, 13 on the other hand, stress that a firm
concept of the information with which information science is concerned is
necessary in order to define properly just what information science does; that is,
to describe the limits of the discipline. This can be a circular argument, for they
begin with an idea about what information science is which leads to a particular
kind of information concept, but their development of the concept itself makes
more explicit the phenomena which information science should study, and the
methods it should use.
A more developmental approach to the necessity of an information concept is
typified by the contribution of Barnes. 14 H e relies upon the philosophy of science

proposed by Kulin, 15 in which the activities of a mature discipline are based upon
a 'paradigm' or way of looking at the field which is c o m m o n to all (or most) of
the practitioners of the science. Without such a paradigm, an effective, or mature,
science cannot exist. Barnes suggests that information science is in a pre-paradigm
state, and that a concept of information is the reasonable candidate for the uni
fying paradigm about which a mature, effective information science would be
organized. Thus, an agreed-upon concept of information is a prerequisite for
information science's ever becoming a 'real', 'mature' science.
Perhaps Fairthorne 1 6 , 1 7 has put it most directly when he suggests that if we are
going to use the term information incessantly, we should at least have some notion
of what it is that we are talking about, even if only for clarity of communication.
Although he does not limit his arguments to only this point, it is clear that it is an
extremely forceful one.
Although all of these arguments have their merits, and seem in toto to be
reasonable counterarguments to Goffman's 7 position, most of them have been
rather incompletely developed, usually serving as a preface to some particular p r o
posal for an information concept. In Belkin 18 I have proposed a number of argu
ments for the potential utility of an information concept for information science,
in terms of the historical development of information science, its social functions,
its present disorganized state and the need for some unity in education, and the
need for some theoretical principle of organization. The last point I should like
to summarize and extend here, to try to make plain w h y this review is being
written.
The basic argument lies in considering science as a particular means for attaining
a certain kind of knowledge. I take science to be:
any social activity which systematically investigates humankind (including its con
structs), phenomena or objects of the human environment (the 'natural world'), or the
interactions of humans with their environment; and which makes public the knowledge
thus gained; (p. 16).
57
and the goal of that activity being knowledge useful or valuable in solving
problems associated with the objects of study. Then scientists are:
any specific social group which engages in science, whose membership is defined by
sharing certain theoretical and methodological assumptions and is limited by peer
recognition. (p. 16).
These ideas of science and scientists are not terribly startling, owing much to
previous contributions as diverse as Kulin,15 Popper,19 and Ravetz, 20 but their
consequences are interesting. One of the most important in this context is that,
given that the scientific model ofattaining knowledge is appropriate for informa
tion science, formulation of the problem which it wishes to solve is of basic
significance. It is through establishment of the problem that the precise area of
systematic, scientific investigation can be specified, and the assumptions govern
ing that activity developed. Here, and drawing upon previous statements by
Wersig and Neveling21 and Belkin and Robertson,22 I take that problem to be:
facilitating the effective communication of desired information between human gene
rator and human user.18 (p. 22.)
This problem then implies at least the following set of concerns for information
science:
1. with information in human, cognitive communication systems;

2. with the relationship between information and generator;
3. with the relationship between information and user;
4. with the idea of desired information;
5. with the effectiveness of information and the effectiveness of information
transfer.
The problem of information science as stated (granted that it is narrower than
other suggestions, such as those of Goffman7 or Otten10) and the concerns which
it implies show that information must be the central phenomenon of interest to
information science. But for a science to be practised (as defined above) there
must be some agreement among its practitioners at least as to what the pheno
menon is which they are to study (this constitutes the basis of the science's
theoretical assumptions). Therefore, we conclude that, given this problem of
information science, and given that the scientific method, and science, is the
appropriate means for solving this problem, there should be some generally
agreed-upon concept of information appropriate to that problem.
Notice that what is suggested here, and indeed by many other writers
(e.g.10,11,22) is that we are not concerned with definitions of information, but
rather with concepts of information. The distinction is that a definition presumably
says what the phenomenon defined is, whereas a concept is a way of looking at, or
interpreting, the phenomenon. Although there have been various reasons pro
posed for the significance of this distinction, the crucial one for this argument is
that by accepting the idea of a concept one becomes free to look for a useful
concept, rather than a universally true definition, of information. This shift in
emphasis allows one effectively to counter Goffman's7 argument in various ways,
even within his own terms of an information science which deals with all aspects
of the information phenomenon. Otten, 10 for instance, proposes that there can
be three separate information concepts which deal with various aspects of the
information phenomenon, according to one's needs. Accordingly, in this review
I shall consider all proposals as proposals for information concepts, rather than
58
definitions, as have, indeed, most of the contributors to the literature. This means
that the proposals will, in general, be evaluated in terms of utility, rather than
truth, which I take to be far too intractable a question for such a discussion.
REQUIREMENTS OF AN INFORMATION CONCEPT FOR

INFORMATION SCIENCE
Information concepts for information science (or closely related fields) have
already been the subject of several critical reviews, the most notable being those
of Gindin23 and Wersig.24 Gindin is concerned with finding an information
concept suitable for examining the semantics of text (which we might call the
linguistic aspects of information science). To do this, he first establishes that cer
tain kinds of information concepts, that is Shannon,25 and Shannon-derivatives,
could in principle not be sufficient, and from that discussion develops some re
quirements ofa suitable concept. He then reviews a few more concepts in the light
of these requirements, concluding that there is no one concept extant which
completely fulfils his requirements, that of Shreĭder26,27 coming closest to satis
fying them. Both the method of this review and its application are well-thought
out, providing interesting results, but the requirements used as its basis are some
what limited, from the point of view of information science as a whole, and the
number and range of concepts reviewed are rather small.

Wersig's24 review of information concepts is much more extensive, perhaps
the most complete collection of information concepts proposed for information
science yet assembled. The method of his review is discussed below (Information
and uncertainty) in some detail, as it is important to the information concept which
he proposes; here I wish only to mention that its major weakness is that his
criteria of adequacy, by which the concepts are judged, are not explicitly stated
and explained, so that it is often difficult to tell why a particular concept has been
found lacking. Nevertheless, this remains an important contribution, although
it may perhaps be a bit dated now.
One other review that is of some interest in this context is that of Marzocco.28
Although he does not examine very many information concepts, he has taken
pains to establish, from the beginning, the context in which such concepts must
operate, the implications of this context, and thus the conditions which an in
formation concept for information science must satisfy. He is particularly con
cerned with the user of the information system, emphasizing that any adequate
information concept must take into account the user's behaviour and the user's
desire and needs.
The method of my review* here will be similar to those mentioned above, al
though hopefully more complete in various ways. Since we are looking for an
information concept which will be suitable and useful for information science, I
begin by considering the context and needs of information science, isolating from
them a minimum set of requirements for an information concept for information
science. I shall then consider in some detail specific examples of a number of types
of information concepts, hoping to show through this discussion of exemplars
how well each type meets the requirements.
The requirements isolated below are based upon the discussions of science and
information science above, in particular on the idea of science as a utility-seeking
enterprise and on the fundamental problem of information science. The former
* Most of this review is based on Chapter Two of my Ph.D. thesis.18
59
requires that any information concept be useful, and the latter indicates the sense
in which usefulness is to be interpreted. The fundamental problem of information
science also indicates the context to which the information concept must relate,
and at least some of the phenomena for which it must account.
These requirements can be classified roughly into three groups: 'methodologi
cal'—having to do with the utility of the concept; 'behavioural'—having to do
with the phenomena for which the concept must account; and 'definitional'—
having to do with the context of the concept. These classes are, of course, not
mutually exclusive, but this approximate division is helpful in isolating the
specific requirements. Note that this classification is a classification of require
ments on any scientific concept, and that here I shall be applying the general
scheme to the specific problem posed by information science.
The definitional requirements arise from the problem that information science
wishes to solve. A significant aspect of this problem is that it implies a social
communication process, in particular purposeful human communication between
generator and user. Therefore, any information concept for information science
must be able to account for information in such a context. Furthermore, any such
concept must be able to deal with the question of desired information, and with
the effect of information on the user; that is, these three factors, integral to the
problem of information science, must be integral to any information concept
which is to be useful to information science. In general, any information concept

for information science must refer to at least the specific domain of information
science, as indicated by its problem. This means purposeful, meaningful, human
communication, with the specific requirements as noted above.
The behavioural requirements of an information concept for information
science depend upon the observed behaviour of users with respect to information.
There are at least three such observations which appear to be especially important
as limiting conditions for an information concept, all of which have been widely
discussed (see, e.g.23,26,28). These are: that different users respond to (learn from)
the same set of data differentially; that the same user will respond to the same set
of data differentially at different times; and that the nature of a user's response
depends to some extent upon the presentation of the data. All of these differences
in response may be equated with the 'varying effect' of the information associated
with the data. The first two of these behavioural observations are generally
explained as being examples of the effect of information being dependent upon
the state of knowledge of the recipient. Or, because no two people have exactly
the same state of knowledge, the same information (or more generally, the same
data) can never have the same effect on two different people; and, since one's state
of knowledge is constantly changing with experience, the same information (or
data) can never have exactly the same effect upon one person at two different
times (this of course does not approach the question of what one has learned from
having been exposed to the information).
The third observation is also dependent upon state of knowledge, but in rather
a different sense. There are two cases in which this observation arises. One is
typified by the same text being presented in two different languages, only one of
which the recipient understands. In this case the recipient probably has no response
to the text in the foreign tongue, although s/he may well have some response to
it in the native language. A less extreme example of this type of problem occurs
when the generator organizes the text poorly, either in its gross narrative or logi
cal structure, or in its linguistic structure (i.e. poor writing).
60
These are examples ofa lack of the required 'meta-information' for understand
ing the text on the part of the recipient, or of a breaking of some meta-informa-
tional rules on the part of the generator. (By meta-information is meant know
ledge about how the information in the text is organized.) The second case
concerns the extent to which an individual believes the text. For instance, it is
conceivable that a recipient will be more greatly affected by information con
veyed by someone who is acknowledged an expert in the field than by the same
information in a student's thesis. A rather different case is when the differential
response depends upon the persuasiveness of the generator of the information.
The first of these examples depends upon the set of beliefs of the recipient, but
the second, although it will take that set of beliefs into account, depends directly
upon the generator's purpose and knowledge of the recipient's state of knowledge
(including the recipient's beliefs).
Thus, the behavioural observations lead to two general relationships which
must be accounted for by any information concept for information science:
the relationship between information and recipient's state of knowledge; and the
relationship among generator's state of knowledge and purpose and the recipi
ent's state of knowledge.
The methodological requirements for an information concept relate directly
to the use to which such a concept will be put. If one wishes to solve the problem
of information science then the prediction of the likely effect of any particular
information upon any particular user is necessary. Thus any information concept
cannot be situation specific, but must be generalizable beyond the individual case.
This is a particularly difficult requirement in view of the observations of human
behaviour noted in the preceding paragraphs. A related methodological require
ment is that the concept of information offers a means by which prediction of its
effect can be carried out, e.g. be amenable to formal modelling. Even if a concept
is situation independent, it is conceivable that it could be only explanatory, rather
than predictive, or that it might not be possible to state it in such a way that one
could draw predictions from it. Such a concept could not be useful in solving the
problem of information science, which requires prediction of effect.
These three approaches to determining the requirements ofa scientific concept:
the definitional; the behavioural; and the methodological, result then in eight
specific requirements for a concept of information for information science (I do
not wish to claim that these eight exhaust all possible requirements of such a
concept, but only that there is a minimum set of such requirements). These
requirements are listed in abbreviated form in Table 1, and will serve as the
standard by which the previously proposed concepts of information for informa
tion science surveyed in the following sections will be judged (note again that
these will be judgements of the utility of the concepts, rather than of their
'truthfulness').
Another way of classifying these requirements, which might facilitate their
application in examining proposals for information concepts, is that any informa
tion concept should be both operational and relevant. Being relevant means
referring to at least the problem and context of information science, and being
operational means capable of being applied to the problem of information science.
(Thus requirements one through six are relevance requirements, and seven and
eight are operational requirements.) A successful information concept should be
operationally relevant, and the proposed concepts discussed in the following
sections will be examined in the first instance to see whether they are, or could be,
61
TABLE 1. The requirements of an information conceptfor information science
1. It must refer to information within the context of purposeful, meaningful com

munication. (D)
2. It should account for information as a social communication process among human
beings. (D)
3. It should account for information's being requested or desired. (D)
4. It should account for the effect of information on the recipient. (D/B)
5. It must account for the relationship between information and state of knowledge
(of generator and of recipient). (D/B)
6. It should account for the varying effects ofmessages presented in different ways. (B)
7. It must be generalizable beyond the individual case. (M)
8. It should offer a means for prediction of the effect of information. (M)
D Definitional Requirement
B Behavioural Requirement
M Methodological Requirement
Requirements 1-6 are relevance requirements
Requirements 7 and 8 are operational requirements
both relevant and operational in the ways required b y the problem of information
science.

Implicit information concepts
Although this review is primarily concerned with explicitly proposed concepts
of information, most work in information retrieval (IR) has managed somehow
to proceed without any such explicit statement. In particular, IR research and
practice seem rarely to have considered this question at all. Yet for IR systems to
exist even as models, their constructors must have at least some implicit idea of
what information is. Because these implicit ideas are difficult to ferret out, and
because even when they are discovered it is difficult to establish all of their implica
tions, examining them in detail against the requirements of Table 1 is not a
particularly fruitful exercise. Yet it is of some importance to try to understand
the implied theoretical underpinnings of IR, since that field as a whole represents
a major attempt to solve the problem of information science. Here I shall consider
briefly proposals by only three contributors to the field, whose w o r k is, I think,
representative of a wide range of theoretical assumptions in IR about the nature
of information.
Salton, 29 in establishing the basic components of any IR system which must be
accounted for by any mathematical theory of IR specifies as first: the objects (i.e.
documents or other records) which together constitute the ' . . . information file
which is to be processed' (p. 2); and as second:
the information identifiers, terms, index terms, key words, attributes, etc., which
characterize the records and represent the information content in each case (p. 2).
Here the implication is that there is some attribute associated with any record
which is the information content of that record. For the purposes of IR, this
information content must be and can be represented, in Salton's example and ex-
62
periments, usually as a set of words each of which represents some aspect of the
information content, all of them together representing the information content
of the record as a whole. Thus, content and information seem closely linked, if not
identical, information being an invariant attribute of the record which can be
represented as a set of individual elements, each capable of being individually
considered.
Robertson30 has developed a theory about some aspects of IR which is based
upon a somewhat more general idea of IR than that of Salton. In particular, he
has taken pains to avoid identifying content with information, at least the content
that is represented in IR systems (by index terms, or any other means). For
Robertson, the reason for such representation is to promote a searching process of
the document store which will retrieve documents '. . . which might assist the
questioner in answering the question, or which might provide him with the
[requested] information', (p. 9). Thus, the representation is not of information,
but rather of the content of the document, a feature which can be used to indicate
whether a document might be capable of answering a question, or of providing
some desired information. Robertson specifies the nature of the content which he
says IR represents when he introduces the concept of synthema:
two documents, or a document and a question, are said to be synthematic if they are
close in subject matter. (p. 53)

We can conclude from this that Robertson interprets IR systems as being con
cerned with representing what documents (and questions) are about. Information
must be related to what the document is about, since knowing that, and what a
question is about, enables the IR system to make some prediction about whether
a document might satisfy a request for information, but the relationship is not
straightforward identity. It appears then that content may be represented as a set
of descriptors, each of which can be considered separately (as in ordinary co
ordinate indexing or in Salton's29 model), but nothing is said about how informa
tion is to be represented, if at all. So we cannot discover from this contribution
what Robertson thinks that information is, but we can conclude that IR systems
typically do not deal with it, but rather with synthema, which appears to be a
higher-order variable. We might assume that information is some quality asso
ciated with a document because of its relationship with the content of the docu
ment, but that can be no more than a reasonable assumption (but see the discussion
of Belkin and Robertson22 in Information as structure, below). Robertson's contri
bution here has been to point out that IR (at least as generally practised) docs not
deal directly with any concept of information, as Salton seems to assume, but
rather with descriptions of a characteristic of documents which may itself be
descriptive of information.
Hillman31 has tried to put into practice a similar distinction in the design of a
specific IR system, LEADERMART. He begins with the observation that in
formation must depend minimally on what the user of the system needs, and
perhaps is dependent upon the time and context ofthe need as well. Thus, Hillman
bases his system design on a user and situation specific concept of information,
presumably in response to some of the arguments which led to the behavioural
requirements of Table 1. The IR system operates by a sentence-by-sentence
logical analysis of documents (and perhaps of requests), the result being a set of
'characteristics' (i.e. noun phrases) indicative of the content (but not of the in
formation) of the document (or request). The content, then, is an invariant
63
property associated with the document, represented by the set of characteristics.
This property is used to order the documents of the file according to their 'perti
nence' to the user's need. The implication appears to be that by appropriate
analysis of need, content can be used to predict information, in the situation
specific sense described above.
Unfortunately, the system appears not to use the situation-specific information
concept in practice. For example:
The user is presented with information judged by LEADERMART to be pertinent to
his inquiry (p. 588).
Information in this use of the term is a quite different concept than that which is
presumably the basis of the system, since it is here used as an invariant attribute
associated with each document (perhaps represented by the set of characteristics?).
User and situation specificity are accounted for now by the ideas of 'pertinence'
and 'acceptability' (the first a system variable, the second a user-specific variable),
which are clearly related to the basic information concept, but not in any well-
defined way. Hillman has begun with a distinction between information and
content, and has gone further than Robertson in that he has specified what he
means by information, but he has been unable to maintain this distinction in his
actual system design. It appears to me that this failure is due to the extreme situa
tion specificity of the original information concept, which, although it should

allow the concept to meet the behavioural requirements of an information con
cept, prevent it from meeting the predictive, operational requirements which an
IR system must be based on. In spite of this failure, the original content-informa
tion distinction is significant, and the attempt to establish a relationship between
the two and to design an IR system about the distinction seems unique.
These three examples of IR theory and practice indicate a range of implicit
information concepts for IR. Thus, Salton's29 concept appears to be one of
information's being an invariant characteristic associated with a document, and
representable by index terms or other descriptors; Robertson's30 of information's
being a (probably) invariant characteristic not straightforwardly related to the
content of a document, which is itself representable in IR system terms, although
the information may not be; and Hillman's31 of information's being dependent
upon both the user and the content of the document in theory, although seem
ingly identical with the content (and thus straightforwardly representable) in
practice. It is difficult to evaluate these concepts of information (except Hillman's)
in terms of the requirements of Table 1, but Salton's appears to be weak on
relevance grounds, while Hillman's fails to be operational. It appears, however,
that the distinction and relationship between information and content (or 'about-
ness') are crucial to IR, and must become more important, and more explicit, in
IR theory and practice.
Classifications of information concepts

In order to discuss explicit information concepts by exemplars of types of con
cepts, it is necessary to establish some classification of information concepts. There
are at least three levels on which information concepts have been classified, for
various purposes. Perhaps the most important purpose, from the economic and
social point ofview, has been to establish whether information should be regarded
as a commodity, in the economic sense, or as some other economic alternative, a
resource, for instance. Ursul and Kazantseva32 have provided the most detailed
64
discussion of this issue, with rather ambiguous results, however. They conclude
that information, in particular scientific information, has some characteristics
associated with traditional commodities (in the Marxist sense) and others which
are not (the former being most apparent in capitalist countries, the latter in
socialist). The implications of this categorization are primarily economic, such
as how, or whether, information should be charged for. For the purposes of this
review, even though this problem is significant, the method is not particularly
suitable. Typically, this categorization must be applied to information concepts
after they have been already specified in some other terms, and it is these other
terms, rather than those of the commodity question, which are applicable to the
requirements of Table 1. However, one should bear in mind that information
concepts will eventually be judged in this light.
A second reason for categorizing information concepts has been to establish
some particular type of information concept, or domain of the information
phenomenon, with which information science should be concerned. Sokolov
and Mankevich,33 for instance, identify three basic types of information: ele
mentary (or physical); biological; and social, and conclude that information
science is concerned with the last. Belkin and Robertson22 define a spectrum of
information phenomena ranging from infra-cognitive to meta-cognitive in order
to determine some unique and self-contained range of phenomena which are the
subject of information science. Although this approach is suitable for proposals

for specific information concepts, it is not too useful as an ordering and cate
gorizing principle for comparing different concepts, for most are found in only
one category.
The typical categorizing approach for persons interested in comparing or
surveying information concepts, and often for those proposing concepts, has
been to establish a classification of possible types of information concepts, dis
cussing the characteristics of each type, and perhaps making some judgement as to
the suitability or applicability of each type to the problem of information science.
Wersig,24 for instance, has established a classification based on a schematization
of communication (see Information and uncertainty, below, especially Fig. 1),
choosing one type as being suitable for information science. Rathswohl,34 on the
other hand, in the course of an essay on the nature of science and the function of
a theory of information science, has proposed four types of information concepts
based on observation of the information phenomenon: information as com
modity;* as process; as state of knowing; and as environment, and two means for
investigating any concept: definitional and critcrial. This logical analysis gives
him eight categories with which he characterizes attempts at understanding or
forming information concepts for information science. This logical, analytical
approach, although certainly useful, runs into the usual classificatory difficulties
when examining a wide range of proposals. That is, not everyone has been kind
enough to have had the surveyor's categorization in mind when developing a
concept, making many assignments to one category or another ambiguous, if
not dubious. Therefore, I have attempted to use literary warrant as the basis of
my classification of information concepts, rather than a theoretical model of
possible types. This has the disadvantages that the various categories are not
obviously in some order, and that they may seem arbitrary or non-commensur
able, but has the advantage that otherwise hybrid types can be dealt with in a
* Note that commodity here, and in many32other papers, such as Otten10, is not used in an
economic sense, as in Ursul and Kazantseva, but in a physical, descriptive sense (e.g. a thing).
65
straightforward way. I have, in fact, attempted to order m y discussion roughly
according to what I conceive of as a decreasing level of generality or applicability;
this is usually, although not always, a function of the width or narrowness of the
proposer's concept of information science. But in the pragmatic tradition, I begin
with an exception to this sequence, in order to discuss together proposals that the
theory of selective information be used as an information concept for information
science.
The theory of selective information

The most commonly proposed information concept for information science (and
the only one from another discipline which is at all often so proposed) is that of
Shannon, 2 5 usually in conjunction with the interpretation by Weaver. 3 5 This is
hardly surprising, since Shannon's information concept is almost the only formal
ized, mathematical, and successfully implemented information concept ever pro
posed for any purpose. Indeed, these characteristics have caused it to be applied
to many fields other than that for which it was originally proposed: telecom
munication. Relatively straightforward applications of the mathematical theory
of communication to the problem of an information concept for information
science have been suggested by Artandi 1 1 and Belzer. 36 There have been a number
of other contributions suggesting this concept be used for other aspects of
information science, such as Lynch, 37 but these two characterize the major
attempts at application of this theory for the particular aspect of information
science considered in this review. Before discussing the individual contributions,
some characteristics of the Shannon information concept in general should be
discussed, especially those which bear on its relevance to information science.
Shannon's information concept (or measure, to be more accurate) is a part of
his Mathematical Theory of Communication which is concerned with:
The fundamental problem of communication [which] is that of reproducing at one
point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently
the messages have meaning ... These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant
to the engineering problem. The significant aspect is that the actual message is one
selected from a set of possible messages35 (p. 31).
In Shannon's formulation, the information source selects a desired message out

of a set of possible messages, the amount of information associated with that
message being related to the probability of that message's being sent. Thus
Shannon's information measure refers not to the message itself in terms of its
contents, but rather to the probabilities assigned by the potential recipient to the
set of all possible messages (or the probabilities inherent in the message system,
as for instance the word frequencies of a particular language), the least probable
message having the highest information value. This appears to be, on the face of
it, an extremely limited view of information, and one which might be difficult
to apply to the context of information science, where information is traditionally
associated with the meaning of a message, rather than the probability (or im
probability) of its receipt.
In particular, this concept of information fails to meet any but the last two of
the requirements of an information concept for information science, for it
explicitly aims not to consider meaningful, social communication, or the p r o b
lems raised by the requirements which refer to the effect of information and the
relationship between information and state of knowledge (except in the case of
66
knowledge of probabilities). However, that it does offer a formalized and
generalizable concept of information is a powerful inducement to apply it to
other contexts. Below, some examples of attempts to apply this measure to the
context of information science, as a fundamental concept of information, are
discussed, with special reference to how well they have succeeded in adapting
the measure so that it can meet the requirements of an information concept for
information science.
Artandi11 has suggested that the Shannon information measure might be used
as a basis for thinking about information in the information science context, and
attempts to extend its potential application by combining it with ideas from
semiotics and by extending it to the idea of reduction of uncertainty in the
recipient, as suggested by Nauta.38 She admits that the Shannon concept is not
directly applicable to information science because of its strictures against con
sidering the meaning of the message, but believes that it can serve as one level of a
series of information concepts which together will be able to deal with all of the
problems of information science. The extent to which Artandi recommends that
the Shannon concept be applied in information science is extremely limited, it
being reserved only for what she terms the syntactic level of encoding, trans
mission, and decoding, taken in their strict communication theoretic senses,
rather than in the more metaphorical meanings ascribed to them by Weaver. 35
Thus, Artandi has not succeeded in (or even attempted) extending the Shannon
information concept so that it is capable of satisfying the requirements of Table 1,
but has rather tried to partition the various areas of interest of information science
in such a way that different information concepts can be used for the different
areas. She does suggest that the general Shannon communication model might
be useful for considering all of information science's problems, and specifically
for integrating the various information concepts which she proposes, but un
fortunately she does not indicate how this can be done in practice, or even in
theory.
Thus, the one area in which she actually proposes that the Shannon information
concept can be applied is narrow indeed, and refers only to technical problems
which lie, for the most part, outside the major interests ofinformation science. She
has not been able to demonstrate that there is any connection between the three
concepts of (or approaches to) information which she recommends, other than
that they all are concerned with communication, or has she demonstrated that
the Shannon concept is fundamental to (or underlies) the other two concepts in
any significant sense. Therefore, her advocacy of the Shannon information con
cept in fact is no more than the use of his general model of communication as a
basic description of communication to be modified according to the needs of the
more meaning-related concepts which she also suggests. But the information
concept itself, which does not enter into Shannon's communication system
description at all, is reserved only for use at non-meaning levels, with semiotics
and reduction of uncertainty being the approaches to information which she
recommends for the meaningful levels of communication.
Belzer36 aims at a more direct application of Shannon's information measure
to information science problems, attempting to show that information theory
can be used as a measure of the semantic information content of texts, and of text
surrogates. Although he discusses the relationship of information theory and
coding theory, and tries to relate this discussion to questions ofsemantic informa
tion, the force of his argument lies in an experiment which purports to measure
67
the amount of information in various text surrogates, and thus prove his conten
tion that information theory is an appropriate means for measuring semantic
information content.
The experiment asked users to determine whether a document was relevant
or non-relevant to a request on the basis of one of various full-text surrogates
(e.g. citations, abstracts, first and last paragraphs), and then gave them the full
texts to make the final relevance decision from. Thus, the predicted relevance or
non-relevance could be compared to the actual relevance or non-relevance for
each class of surrogate. These data were used to estimate probabilities of correct
or incorrect prediction for the various surrogates, and these probabilities were
then substituted into variations of the Shannon information measure,
in order to compute what he terms entropies for the various possible conditions.
Having computed these entropies he uses them to determine a measure called the
'transmitted correct information in the system', or the amount of information
transmitted by each surrogate, measured in bits. This final measure is determined
by assigning one bit of information to the full document, and using the various
entropies to determine the relative bits per surrogate.
I shall not discuss here the experiment itself, or the particular measures and
manipulations used by Belzer, except to note that what he has done is a relatively
simple transformation of data (percentages ofcorrect predictions based on various
surrogates) which are quite descriptive in their original form, in order to arrive
at a single measure of effectiveness for each class of surrogate. He still has no
measure of the total information content of the document, assuming it to have
an entropy (information content) of one; therefore, his claim that he is measuring
meaningful information is not supported by his data. Although he may have
developed a scale on which to compare the effectiveness of various document
surrogates, he has specifically avoided considering the effectiveness of the docu
ment itself, which is a basic condition of the fundamental problem of information
science. Thus, this attempt at applying Shannon's information concept to in
formation science fails to extend it sufficiently to fulfil any but the last two
requirements of Table I.
Thus, the limitations of the information measure of communication theory
seem to be insurmountable obstacles to its straightforward application to con
texts in which the meaning of a message (or its information) is significant. It is
possible to use the Shannon information measure in restricted situations within
information science in which meaning is not significant, as Lynch,37 among others,
demonstrates, but attempts to use it beyond such contexts either fail, as did
Belzer's, or must use it in conjunction with other, more extended concepts, as
did Artandi's.
The problems associated with applying the Shannon information measure
straightforwardly to the context of information science have been noted by
almost all those information scientists who have been concerned with the place
of information in information science. Many investigators have therefore at
tempted to develop or propose alternative concepts of information which could
be used by information science; that is, which relate to the context of information
science, at least as they understand that context. In almost all of these proposals,
the development of a suitable concept has depended upon first specifying more
68
or less precisely the context in which that concept is to be used; that is, establishing
just what information science is, or what information science should be con
cerned with. Very few of these ideas are identical, although all admit that in
formation science must at the very least deal with meaningful information, and
most concede that it must consider the effect of information on the recipient.
The general information phenomenon

A number of information scientists have suggested that information science
should be concerned with the information phenomenon in all of its aspects; that
is, that it should be a science of information in its most general sense. There is an
immediately obvious difficulty with this position, since it is difficult to see if there
is any useful and unifying concept which is common to all interpretations and
uses of the term information. Goffman7 has argued that such a concept cannot be
formulated, and therefore the attempt should not be made. But in the context
of this discussion, we have decided that to solve the problem of information
science some information concept is necessary. The question then becomes one
of trying to identify some information concept which is useful in the senses
described above, which will meet the requirements of an information concept for
information science and which is applicable to all senses of the term, information.
Often 10,39 is one of those who has proposed that information science should be
a general science of information. He has realized some of the consequences of

this position, and has therefore attempted to develop a structure in which a
general, yet useful, idea of information is possible. In10 he has suggested that there
are various possible concepts of information according to the purpose for which
they arc needed, using a threefold distinction very similar to that proposed by
Artandi.11 The ideas that unite them are of
. . . information as the common descriptor for all non-physical aspects and interactions
between and among man, machines, and the universe and as the common descriptor
for knowledge . . . 10 (p. 95),
of information as inextricably associated with matter and energy; and of informa
tion as an aspect of communication. He does not suggest information concepts
for the individual levels which he has isolated, or docs he indicate how these
common ideas work to integrate the possible information concepts, but rather
presents this contribution as a program for scientifically investigating the in
formation concept. As such, this contribution does not provide any information
concept which can be evaluated against the requirements of Table 1.
Otten39 has used this program in a later contribution which specifies his ideas
more precisely. Here he develops a more specific, four-level system model of
information transfer within which theories of information could be developed,
each level requiring a different specific information concept. These levels are
similar to those of Weaver35 and Artandi,11 although Otten has introduced a
distinction between physical and syntactic levels. But more important from our
point of view, he has also introduced a general information concept which may
be evaluable in terms of Table 1. In this general model, information is a system-
specific interpretation of external stimuli; that is, an internal state-change in the
system which may or may not be externally observable. System-specificity
allows different ideas of information to exist at the different levels, which are
unified by the general concept and by the interdependence of the levels.
Because the concept is so general, it is difficult to find specific consequences
69
which relate to our requirements. Otten, in fact, suggests this contribution only
as a framework within which theories of information can be developed. Yet any
theory developed within this framework must have the basic characteristics of
the fundamental information concept. And this concept, however it relates to
the relevance requirements of Table I, cannot meet the operational requirements.
Because information in this concept is the state-change, there is no means for
making it generalizable beyond the individual case or for predicting the effect
of information. Whether this general concept of information is useful in integrat
ing all information phenomena is still a moot point, but even if it is, its interpreta
tion in terms of the problem of information science as stated here cannot be
useful. Perhaps the analysis by systems could be useful given some other informa
tion concept, but this cannot be judged without specific examples.
Information as category and as property of matter

The understanding and integration of a concept of information into the system
of dialectical materialism have been a major philosophical topic in the USSR for
some twenty years. The major reason for this concern lies in the two properties
of matter prescribed by Marxism-Leninism, variety and reflection. Understanding
or knowing an object is based upon the reflection of its variety, which seems to
indicate that reflection must be related to some sense of information, especially
within a closed-system environment. Much work has been done by Soviet

philosophers in attempting to define this aspect of information in information-
theoretic or cybernetic terms, but little has been done to relate any of these ideas
to information as it applies to social contexts other than those immediately
relevant to philosophy. Perhaps the major attempts of this type have been pro
posed by Ursul, 40,41,42 whose work is of special significance to us because he has
specifically considered the question of information in the information science
context, and related information in this context to his general philosophical
information concept.
Ursul aims to develop a description of information which can encompass all
of the various specific information concepts which have been, and may be, pro
posed for use in various contexts, and which can relate them to the basic philo
sophical categories of variety, reflection, structure, etc. In order to do this, he
proposes that information itself is a fundamental property of matter and of con
sciousness, acting to connect the two by means of its relationship with variety
and reflection. This relationship lies in the postulate of two basic kinds of informa
tion: objective information, which is a property of matter and is a measure of its
categories associated with a particular natural object; and subjective or ideal in
formation, which is the reflection in an individual's consciousness of the objective,
material information. Thus, information is dependent upon the categories, in
particular the categories of variety, and of matter, whether it is considered as
objective, external information or the subjective, internal information which
leads to knowledge of that object. Ursul suggests that there are various ways in
which objective information might be measured, depending upon which cate
gory is of primary importance, but does not indicate very clearly whether similar
measures, such as entropy, are applicable to ideal, subjective information.
In the USSR, the context ofinformation science (or informatics) has been almost
universally agreed to be that of scientific (nauchnyi) information; that is, informa
tion which arises from scientific (in its broadest sense, to include all systematic
investigation) activities. Ursul accepts this delimitation, and develops concepts of
70
scientific knowledge and scientific information which derive from his general
concept, but which can be useful in the specific context of information science,
which means effective use of scientific information and analysis of its growth.
Scientific knowledge is defined not in individual terms, but as social knowledge,
which is the result of cognition upon subjective information, and then scientific
information is the aspects of the variety of scientific knowledge which are con
cerned with relationships between the forms and between the contents of scien
tific knowledge. That is, scientific information is the relational system of scien
tific facts, theories, hypotheses, laws, and publications, which arc the result of
humankind's observation of nature and of itself. This concept of scientific infor
mation is related to information in general in that it is a reflection of the variety
inherent in the ideal information; which in turn is a reflection of objective
information. A major defining characteristic of scientific information is that it is,
by virtue of its emphasis on relations, a transmittable form ofscientific knowledge.
In this concept, then, information can be related to objective reality, it is con
sidered in terms of structure and organization, and it can be related to other
information concepts through its connections with the idea of information in
general. How well then does this concept meet the requirements of Table 1?
Ursul's concept of scientific information appears to be capable of meeting at
least one of the operational requirements of an information concept, through its
relationship with objective reality. Although there are some transformations

involved, information in this sense is in the end social and objective, and thus
generalizable. Unfortunately, this concept has very little to say about communi
cation, being primarily concerned with the relationship between the external
world and scientific knowledge, rather than with the communication of scientific
information among human beings. In particular, it fails to deal with the status of
scientific information from the point of view of the recipient of that information;
is information then considered as a material object, whose variety is reflected as
subjective information in terms of the recipient, or is it some entirely different
class of phenomenon? One cannot say.
Furthermore, this concept cannot deal with the varying effect of information,
since information is objective even when ideal, and cannot have any but one
effect. Thus, although the first requirement is partially met in that this is a concept
of meaningful information, and although the second and seventh requirements
are met, the remainder of the requirements are not dealt with, and do not seem
capable of being interpreted in terms of this information concept. Thus, this
attempt to consider information as a universal property of matter in its own right,
and to derive from this standpoint a useful concept ofinformation for information
science, appears to have failed.
Formal semantic information

Another investigator in the USSR, IU. A. Shrelder, has attempted a rather less
ambitious approach to an information concept for information science. Less
ambitious, in that he has decided to deal only with one concept of information
which is specific to information science, but perhaps more ambitious in that his
information science context is broader than that of Ursul. It is broader especially
in that it is not limited to scientific information as defined by Ursul, but is con
strained only by the notion of meaning. Thus, Shreĭder notices that one reason
that the Shannon information measure has not been applicable to information
science is that it does not deal with meaningful, semantic information, which is
71
the kind of information with which information science must be concerned.
Therefore, he attempts to develop a concept of semantic information, which will
be an information concept relevant for information science.
Shreĭder has carried out this program in a number of publications, the most
accessible to the non-Russophone being Shreĭder,26,27 and the latest extention of
these ideas being found in Shreĭder.43 In these publications, Shreĭder develops a
theory of information which aims to be useful within the context of purposeful,
meaningful communication, and which aims explicitly to account for various
observations concerning the effect of information. In particular, he considers that
information science is specifically concerned with the problem of what a recipient
can learn from a text, which he claims is the question with which his semantic
information theory also deals.
Shreĭder's theory of semantic information is based upon a message or text, T, a
thesaurus, θ, and an operator, AT, θ is a representation of a recipient's state of
knowledge (or of the state of knowledge of the generator of the text in his ex
tended theory), and AT is an operator derived from T by θ, which transforms θ
to a new state. Because Shreĭder is concerned with the question of what a recipient
can learn from a text, he defines 'the amount of [semantic] information J ( θ , T ) . . .
as the degree of change of the thesaurus under the action of the given statement
T' 26 (p. 225), that change being effected by the operator AT. The rules for con
structing AT are, in the general case, part of the recipient thesaurus, θ.

Within this basic framework, according to Shreĭder, one can deal with situa
tions in which a greater amount of a priori knowledge in θ increases J(θ, T), at
least to some maximum point of beneficial a priori knowledge. This is in fact a
direct response to the arguments which led to requirement 5 of Table 1. In
Shreĭder,26 he has gone on to formalize this system in logical terms, defining the
constituents of 0, and indicating how AT can be formed from defined elementary
operators, chosen on the basis of canonical statements determined from T. This
constitutes one of the very few formal descriptions of a communication system
relevant to information science.
In Shreĭder,43 he has gone on to consider more explicitly the question of com
munication between thesauri, dealing in particular with the idea of meta-in-
formation, which is information about how the semantic information in T is
organized. This meta-information (or knowledge) then is a component of both
the recipient thesaurus and the generating thesaurus, and provides the basis for
communication between the two. Mismatches of meta-information may be even
more serious than mismatches of conceptual information, for meta-information
provides the key for extracting the elementary (canonical) statements from T,
and if the rules (meta-information) by means of which the generator has encoded
these statements in Tare unfamiliar to the recipient, s/he will be unable to extract
them correctly. Thus, meta-information may be interpreted as at least some of
the rules for the formation of AT. In this later work Shreider contends that in
formation science should be more concerned with this type ofinformation; that is,
information about how semantic information is distributed, organized, and
structured (cither in single texts or in conglomerates), rather than with the under
lying semantic information. This change in emphasis may, perhaps, be due to
some difficulties which are inherent in the original semantic information concept.
Shreĭder's concept of information deals quite well with requirements 1, 4, 5,
and 6 of Table 1, as he has explicitly considered these factors in developing the
concept. It appears to be extendable to deal with requirements 2 and 3 as well,
72
although he has not considered them specifically. Thus, his concept is certainly
relevant to the context of information science. Unfortunately, because of his
concern with the effect of information, and with being able to provide a basis for
quantification of information, Shreĭder's information concept is not operational.
That is, his information measure is entirely dependent upon the individual com
municative event, and therefore fails to satisfy requirements 7 and 8. Note, how
ever, that ifAT were identified as the information, and if the rules for determining
AT were independent of the individual thesaurus (as is the idea of meta-informa-
tion, at least in principle), then one might have a generalizable information concept.
This problem with Shreĭder's original semantic information concept may be a
cause of the increasing emphasis in his work on meta-information; but that latter
concept is still too dependent on his basic formalism to be of operational use.
Thus, although Shreĭder has managed to fulfil many of the relevance require
ments of an information concept for information science, his preoccupation with
devising a concept which can be measured, and especially with one which is
founded upon the effect of information, has prevented him from developing an
operationally relevant information concept.
Information as event
Pratt, 41 has attempted to determine an information concept specific to informa
tion science by developing a model of the communication system with which

information science is concerned, and deriving a meaning of information which
is sensible within that system. Although this is not a unique approach to the
problem of determining an information concept, the information concept which
he eventually proposes is at least novel. That concept is that information be con
sidered as an event which takes place at a particular stage in the communication
process. This is in strong contradistinction to other information concepts which
treat information as a property ofmatter, or ofa message, or ofa recipient. Because
ofthis difference, it is at least possible that this concept might be able to satisfy some
of the requirements on an information concept for information science which
the other concepts that have been considered have not been able to meet.
Pratt's 41 communication model is of some interest in itself, but for our pur
poses here it is sufficient to mention that it involves two separate systems: one of
source, purpose, language, and medium, resulting in a graphic record; the other
of recipient, predisposition, and knowledge of or preference for language and
medium. The means to communication between source and recipient, which
are not joined in his model, is through matching of predisposition with purpose
and recipient language and medium with source language and medium (i.e. with
the graphic record which the source has produced). Note that information in this
system must be related to the graphic record in some sense, and need not be
concerned with direct communication between source and recipient.
Within this communication system, Pratt has said that the source and recipient
can be represented (as a simplifying assumption) by their 'images' (in Boulding's45
sense), and that the purpose and predisposition components ofhis communication
system refer to an intent to change a recipient's image (in scientific communica
tion in order to correspond more closely with the source's image) and a willing
ness (or desire) for that image to be changed. Within this context, Pratt then re
turns to one of the original Latin meanings of inform, to inwardly shape, in order
to say that: 'Information is the alteration of the image which occurs when it
receives a message.'44 (p. 215).
73
He believes that the key event in the communication system is: 'that-which-
occurs-within-the-mind-upon-absorption-of-a-message' (ibid.), and contends
that information is the appropriate term for this event. Thus, information is the
effective event. He realizes that this is perhaps too non-conventional a usage of
the term, so qualifies it by calling this concept the 'informative event'. However,
this remains his concept of information, which he is at pains to distinguish from
'meaning', whether it be meaning intended by the source, meaning understood
by the recipient, or conventional meaning. How does such a concept of informa
tion fare when evaluated against the requirements of Table I?
Requirements 1 and 2 are straightforwardly fulfilled through the context of
the communication model, 3 is explicitly dealt with by the predisposition com
ponent, and 4 and part of 5 are met by the definition of information itself. The
relationship between information and the generator's state of knowledge is not
so clear-cut, although the purpose component of the communication system
might be relevant here. Requirement 6 might be at least partially covered by the
question of language and medium, and by the explicit dependence of information
on the recipient's image. Thus, this information concept is relevant to information
science. However, it is definitely not operational, for two basic reasons. The first
is that this concept of information must be situation specific—there is no way to
generalize from one informative event to another; the second is that there is no
possibility of prediction on the basis of information, since the information resides

in the image of the recipient, and in no external form at all. Unfortunately, this
means that with this information concept, information retrieval, as we now con
ceive of it, is impossible, which, although IR systems are in fact not too good at
what they try to do, is contradicted by the evidence that they at least perform their
functions with better than chance results.6 Thus, at least this concept of informa
tion as an event, rather than as a property, fails to meet the requirements (especially
the operational requirements) ofa concept ofinformation for information science.
Information and uncertainty

Wersig24 has also discussed information in terms of a communication system,
and has provided one ofthe most detailed and complete discussions of information
concepts proposed for information science. He specifically recognizes the neces
sity of a relevant and operational information concept to the development of a
unified information science, and actually attempts to use a specific concept in just
this way. Wersig begins his development of an information concept by making
a typology of possible information concepts based upon a model of the (informa
tion) transmission process, indicated in Fig. 1, where each lower-case letter
identifies a possible type of information definition.
Wersig classifies and discusses previously proposed information concepts
according to the schema of Fig. 1, and on that basis decides that only 'effect'-
type definitions can be relevant to information science. He then goes on to ex
amine the various possible effect-based concepts of information in terms of
whether they can possibly be operational in the information science context.
Unfortunately he does not make clear just what being operational entails before
embarking on this critique, although some general sense of the idea emerges
through the discussion of each type of information concept.
Thus, the concept of information as an effect in general (as, for instance, any
change in structure) is dismissed as being too all-encompassing, and therefore not
operational. The concept of information as a change in knowledge also fails to
74
meet his criteria for two reasons: that it is difficult, if not impossible, to determine
a state of knowledge at all, and even more difficult to deal with a constantly
changing (as it must be) state of knowledge; and that such an information concept
is not clearly enough related to the needs and purposes of information science.
But the only alternative concept of information left, that of reduction of un
certainty or doubt, also fails to meet his operationality test, because its basic
concepts (events and uncertainty) have not been properly explicated or discrimi
nated from the idea of knowledge. However, he considers that the idea of un
certainty is capable of being defined in such a way as to be relevant to the context
of information science, and to be operational, and continues by developing just

such a notion.
Wersig is searching specifically for an information concept which will be rele
vant in the context of meaningful human communication, and which, he states,
must therefore be based on some model of humankind, and on how humans
behave. He suggests as the basis for this analysis the 'Kybiak-Struktur' proposed
by Stachowiak46 which is a cybernetic model of the interaction of a human with
her/his environment. It consists ofa perceptor mechanism, an effector mechanism,
a mediating operator, a motivator which directs the other three components, and
the environment. In this model, the operator is the mechanism by which the
organism builds up a model of the external world, and furthermore contains that
model as well as a model of the organism's internal situation and a series of pro
grams or instructions for action. Through a series of definitions, beginning with
that of organism, and leading through concept, perception, and knowledge to
problematic situation he finally defines doubt (roughly) as the condition of an
organism in a problematic situation which cannot be directly resolved through
its stored perceptual events, concepts or programs. Then information in its
widest sense is reduction in uncertainty (that is, appropriate change in the rele
vant elements of the operator), and information for information science (its
narrow sense) is reduction in uncertainty by means of communication pro
cesses. He clarifies this final restriction by going on to a detailed discussion of
communication, and of his information concept in that system, which however
is not directly relevant to discussion of his proposed information concept, at least
as far as examining it in terms of the requirements of Table 1 is concerned (with
the exception of requirements 1 and 2, which he demonstrates are met in his later
discussion).
Although in Wersig's terms his concept is, obviously, relevant, there is some
doubt about its relevance in the terms of this discussion. Requirements 1-4 are
certainly met, but it is not certain just how this information concept can be re
lated to the generator's state ofknowledge, nor how it can possibly meet require-
75
merit 6. But the major difficulty with this concept lies in the operational require
ments. Although Wersig has stated that it is operational, and he has certainly
achieved his aims of defining doubt and of producing an information concept
which is specific to the needs and purposes of information science, his idea of
being operational does not seem to include being able to use the information
concept in a practical sense. Thus, since it is defined in terms of the individual's
uncertainty, it must be situation-specific, and since it does not relate to anything
outside the individual, it cannot be used in any predictive sense. Although Wersig
has been most scrupulous about his definitions, and has carefully developed a mo
del which relates specifically to the context of information science, he has failed to
develop an adequate information concept because he has concentrated exclusively
upon the recipient in the communication system, without considering how the
recipient can be related to the rest of the system through an information concept.
Information and decision-making

Yovits and his colleagues,8,9 have attempted to develop a 'Generalized Informa
tion System' (GIS) which can serve as the basis for the development of what he
calls a 'true information science'. Yovits begins this project by attempting to
determine what he considers to be an appropriate information concept, for he
believes that it is only by defining appropriate concepts that a science can become
effective, and then uses this concept in order to specify the characteristics of the
GIS.
The primary constraints on the eventual information concept are that it be
broader in scope than the Shannon concept, yet narrower in scope than the idea
of information as knowledge, and that it be 'amenable to the quantification and
conceptualization necessary in order to establish a real science'8 (p. 371). These
constraints, especially the constraint that information be operationally measur
able, and perhaps the bias of Yovits's source discipline, have results in the informa
tion concept that: information is data ofvalue in decision-making. Thus, Yovits's
concept of information is limited only to situations in which decisions are made,
but since he defines decision-making as purposeful activity or intelligent be
haviour, the concept is rather more general than might at first be thought. But in
order to define the system properly, and to quantify information, it is necessary
to state just what decision-making is.
According to Yovits, to be of value in decision-making means to resolve or
reduce uncertainty. Yovits has found difficulties with previous definitions of
uncertainty similar to those of Wersig, and so has proceeded to develop ideas of
uncertainty which apply to his basic model of decision-making. This has resulted
in two kinds of uncertainty, structural and relational, which correspond to the
types of knowledge that a decision-maker can have of a system about which it
must make a decision. These two types of uncertainty, together with the decision
elements of: courses of action; possible outcomes; goals; and states of nature, are
used by Yovits in order to construct a probabilistic decision matrix, using standard
decision-theoretic techniques.
Given this decision matrix, Yovits then defines a measure of the uncertainty
of the decision state described by the decision matrix, based on the distribution
of expected values of various outcomes of decisions, and defines the information
associated with that state as:
76
wheremis the number of courses of action, and P(ai) is the probability that course
of actionai,will be chosen.
Then the information in the data is the difference between I before the receipt
of the data and I after receipt of the data.
This information concept, although couched in mathematical, presumably
formal, and measurable terms, does not do very well in meeting the requirements
of Table 2. Requirements 1 and 2, for instance, although given lip service, arc
not really treated by this concept at all, for it does not deal with communication
except incidentally. It is possible that social human communication can be accom
modated by this concept, but as formulated to date there are some aspects of
communication, such as social knowledge, which do not seem amenable to
analysis in this framework. Requirements 3, 4, and 5 are more adequately met,
although the relationship between information and generator, because of the
lack of a formal communication model, is again not considered. Requirement 6
is not considered at all within the framework of this information concept. But
most surprisingly given the emphasis on measurability and operationalism in the
genesis of this concept, the operational requirements are specifically not met. That
is, this concept of information is completely situation, context, individual, and
time dependent, therefore offering no means for prediction of effect. Thus, a
decision-theoretic based information concept appears to be neither relevant nor
operational in the context of information science, illustrating again the difficulties

inherent in straightforwardly applying methods from other disciplines to the
problems of information science.
Social, scientific information

A much more restricted approach to an information concept for information
science has been proposed by Mikhaĭlov, Chernyĭ, and Giliarevskiĭ17 (hereafter
referred to as MCG), based on a definite idea of what information science aims to
do, and on the initial premise that information science should limit itself to
scientific information. In Belkin48 I have discussed their proposal in some detail;
here I shall summarize that discussion only enough to show how it relates to the
requirements of Table 1.
MCG's basic method is to construct a classification of information concepts
according to twelve basic characteristics, which they claim are properties of
scientific information, derived from observation and analysis of scientific-tech
nical information activities. Thus, they successively divide the broad intuitive
idea of information into social and non-social, social information into semantic
and non-semantic, and semantic information into scientific and non-scientific.
These twelve properties, the last four of which are unique to scientific informa
tion, are displayed in Table 2.
After using these properties to define scientific information in general, MCG
use a classification of types of scientific information devised by Siforov49 in order
to indicate better the elements of scientific information. This 'content structure' of
scientific information begins with information about scientific facts; which is used
to build up information about hypotheses, concepts, and theories; both of which
are then united by information which forms the basis of a science or discipline;
and all three of which are combined to form information for decision-making.
This concept of scientific information may be best related to the requirements
of an information concept through the properties, and how they have been
derived.
77
TABLE 2. The properties of scientific information.
(After Mikhaĭlov, Chernyĭ, and Giliarevskiĭ,47 and Belkin48.)
1. Inseparable from physical carrier

2. Non-additive, non-commutative, non-associative
3. Presence of value
4. Public nature
5. Semantic character
6. Linguistic nature
7. Independence of language and channel
8. Discrete
9. Cumulative
10.Independent of its creator
11. Aging
12.Dispersion.
Briefly, it meets, at least to some extent, requirements 1 and 2 through proper

ties 3,4, and 5, and it meets requirement 7 especially through property 10, which
allows one to speak of information in the general, rather than situation-specific,
sense. Additionally, this concept says a great deal about the nature of social, public
information which is not implied by the requirements of Table 1, but which are
certainly important in any study of the social organization of scientific informa
tion. MCG have, in fact, concentrated upon just this aspect of information, and
have done so to the exclusion of the individual, and especially of the effect of
information upon its recipient. Because of this limitation, it does not deal with
requirements 3-6, of the relevance requirements, or with requirement 8, of the
operational requirements. It is possible that this information concept could be
extended to meet at least some of these requirements by attempting to apply it
within an appropriate communication system, but since the authors have not
done such an analysis, this remains a moot point. Although MCG's approach is
on the face of it practical and pragmatic, it is evident that no concept of informa
tion which neglects the recipient can be adequate for the purposes of information
science.
Information as knowledge surrogate

Farradane50 has proposed that information must be considered as a representation
or surrogate of (internal) knowledge or thought. This is, indeed, one of the
common-sense, everyday notions of information, and is often used as a definition
when only a few words can be spared for information in the treatment of some
other topic, or when the term must be used informally before it can be more
strictly defined. This concept also has something in common with Ursul's41
'scientific information', which must also be in some external, documentary form.
Farradane, however, spends some time on this notion, not relying merely on
common sense, or basing his concept on a more fundamental idea of information,
but rather developing it within an explicitly stated idea of what information
science is, or should be, and within the context which this idea implies. He arrives
at his information concept by first defining the field of study of information
science, which 'must. . . certainly include some study of human beings, and in
particular their processes of thinking and their behaviour in all actions relating
78
to communication, whether they are the originators, the manipulators, or the
recipients of communications' (p. 96). By analyzing the communication system
thus defined, and the processes which take place in it, Farradane notes that the
only externally available element is the physical object which is a representation
of what is meant to be communicated, and that, he says, is information.
Farradane himself finds this information concept too constricting to be of
fundamental use to information science, pointing out that it docs not consider
the effect of information on the recipient. He recommends that information
science use this concept only in terms of its relationship with knowledge. His
concept then deals directly only with requirements 1, 2, perhaps 3 and 5, and 7.
But one significant reason that he has not been able to deal with the question of
effect is that he considers the meaning of the representation separately from the
information. W e r e his concept of information to address this question directly,
then it might well be capable of meeting more of the requirements of a concept of
information for information science. But Farradane's approach, deriving an
information concept on the basis of the cognitive communication system with
which information science is concerned, seems to be potentially fruitful, and
perhaps in combination with some other concepts could form the core of an
information concept which would satisfy all of the requirements of Table 1.
Information as structure
T h e concept of information as structure is inherent in many of the proposals
that have been reviewed, but has not been explicitly stated as their basis. Yet it
appears that this idea offers a means to resolving the conflict between the relevance
conditions and the operational conditions which has by n o w become apparent.
Thompson 5 1 proposed that information be considered as organization (not
entropy or neg-entropy), in particular organization of sense-data and experience,
but also as organization on various conglomerates. He proposed this not as a
concept specific to information science, but since he presented this idea at a con
vention of the American Documentation Institute, I shall treat aspects of it as if
it were proposed in this light.
Thompson's basic point is that the structuring of what we experience is the
informative event (much as is Pratt's), but that information can be considered as
the resulting structure, or organization, rather than the event itself. Even within
the mind, according to Thompson, one can speak of organization, and identify
it with information, and when considering the communication of these internal
structures, and the handling of the communicative records, then the concepts of
organization or structure become even more apparent. The effect of information
in such a system can then be considered as change in the organization of the
recipient, whether it be an individual or a discipline. This basic concept of in
formation, although not fully fleshed out by Thompson, has much to recom
mend itself for the purposes of information science.
Thompson has not dealt with all of the questions which lead to the require
ments of Table 1, but his concept does deal with at least the relevance require
ments 4 and 5, and with both of the operational requirements, and could in
principle be extended to at least requirements 1 and 3 without too much difficulty.
T h e unique characteristic of this particular concept is that it has found a w a y to
talk about the effect of information while not identifying information with that
effect. This idea of structure is basic to the two much more detailed concepts
discussed next.
79
22
Belkin and Robertson have developed an explicitly structural concept of
information for information science based on the position that the one notion
c o m m o n to all, or most, uses of information is that of structures being changed.
This leads us to suggest that, in general:
information is that which is capable of transforming structure (p. 198);
which, although clearly an overstatement, and not useful as an information con
cept, per se, does provide a basis for discussing the information phenomenon in a
way which allows identification of an information concept suitable for informa
tion science in particular, yet related to information concepts in other fields. This
is done by constructing an information spectrum ordered from relatively simple
to increasingly complex structural changes. This spectrum is than interpreted in
terms of the problem of information science, which is effectively the same as that
stated in the Introduction. T h e problem then defines a particular part of the
information spectrum, which is characterized b y :
the deliberate (purposeful) structuring of the message by the sender in order to affect the
image structure of the recipient. This implies that the sender has knowledge of the
recipient's structure (p. 200).
W e go on to show that this partition results in an independent, unique, and self-
contained information concept which is specific to the purpose of information

science. This concept is defined in terms of the text in information science, which
is:
. . . a collection ofsigns purposefully structured by a sender with the intention of changing
the image-structure of a recipient,
information (in information science) being:
. . . the structure of any text which is capable of changing the image structure of some
recipient (p. 201).
This information concept seems to do fairly well when judged against the re
quirements of Table 1. It answers requirements 1 and 2 because it is derived from
a partition of the information spectrum which is concerned with meaningful,
purposeful human communication, and with number 4 by requiring that in
formation be capable of effecting a change in some recipient. It accounts for at
least some aspects of requirement 5, since the information structure is defined as
a product of the sender's state of knowledge, and with requirement 7, since
information in this concept is an invariant structure associated with any text.
And it leaves open the possibility of fulfilling requirement 8, prediction, if change
in image structure can be related to information structure in some regular way.
Thus, although this concept does not explicitly deal with requirements 3 and 6,
and may have some difficulties with requirement 5, it has managed to fulfil both
relevance and operational requirements to a greater extent than any of the con
cepts previously reviewed.
In Belkin 18 I have extended and modified this information concept primarily by
using the idea of structure within an analysis of the communication system of
interest to information science. I take that system to be a recipient-controlled com
munication system (see also Paisley and Parker 3 2 on this topic), instigated by the
recipient's anomalous state of knowledge concerning some topic. This leads to an
explicitly cognitive view of the situation with which information science is con
cerned, which is outlined in Fig. 2.
80
The system is interpreted as follows: A potential generator of a text decides to

communicate some aspect of her/his state of knowledge about the world. This
decision effects a partition of the generator's entire state of knowledge, isolating
knowledge about some specific topic. This is the generator's conceptual structure
which is the basis of what is to be communicated. But before this structure can
be put into a communicable form, it must undergo various transformations
according to the generator's purpose and intent, and knowledge of the intended
recipients. For instance, all of a statistician's knowledge about probability and
statistics would serve as the initial basis for a general text for, say, first-year social
science students and for a monograph on the theoretical basis of probability and
statistics. Yet this basic structure would certainly be modified to take account of
the basic purpose of the communication, the intent (education or persuasion) and
knowledge of the likely state of knowledge of the recipients (what they are
capable of understanding). The modified conceptual structures for these two
communicative activities would be substantially different, although their basis is
the same. This modified structure is then converted by linguistic (or other rules)
into a communicable structure, the text, which becomes a part of the corpus of
texts to which potential recipients have access.
The recipient instigates the communication system by recognizing an anomaly
in her/his state of knowledge, this recognition being akin to the partition of
generator's state of knowledge which identifies the conceptual structure to be
communicated. The recipient then converts this anomalous state of knowledge
(ASK) into some communicable structure (e.g. a request), which is used to
retrieve from the corpus of texts some text or texts which might be appropriate
for resolving the anomaly. The recipient interprets the text to discover the con
ceptual structure underlying it, this structure interacts with the recipient's ASK,
and the recipient then makes a decision as to whether the anomaly has been
sufficiently resolved. If yes, the system is closed, if no, the system is reinstigated,
with the new ASK as its basis.
In this communication system there is one element which seems to be repre-
sentable, and capable of serving as an information concept which would satisfy
the conditions of Table 1. Thus, in Belkin18 I have proposed that
the information associated with a text is the generator's modified (by purpose, intent,
knowledge of recipient's state of knowledge) conceptual structure which underlies the
surface structure (e.g. language) of that text (p. 117).
This information concept then satisfies requirements 1 and 2 straightforwardly,
through the context of the communication system. It meets requirement 3 in
81
that it is dependent upon a recipient-instigated communication system, based on
the ASK. Requirements 4 and 5 are inherent in the concept and its context, for the
effect of the information is dependent upon the extent to which the ASK is
modified, that is, upon the state of knowledge of the recipient, varying states of
knowledge reacting differently to the same information. Requirement 6 is met
by considering the process of interpretation of text by recipient, where meta-
informational rules must be met in order for 'proper' interpretation to take place,
and in the knowledge structure of the recipient, which will be modified according
to beliefs and values as well as conceptual structures. Requirement 7 is met by the
invariance of this concept, and requirement 8 by the relationship of information
and recipient's state ofknowledge. Because they are both considered as structures,
and because the information structure is derived from a knowledge structure,
the effect of the information associated with any particular text can be predicted,
given some idea of the recipient's state of knowledge, and some means for repre
senting state of knowledge.
Thus it appears that a structural, cognitive concept of information is capable
of meeting the requirements that have been set of an information concept for
information science. The concept I have proposed draws on a wide range of
sources, and is related to many other information concepts, including, in informa
tion science, state-change concepts such as those of Otten39 or Wersig24 or
Farradane50 and structure-based concepts such as Thompson's.51 From outside

this field, the information concept of MacKay53 is strikingly similar in many
respects, being based on representation of structure. What appears to make the
proposed concept unique is the combination of a cognitive communication
system, a structural representation of knowledge, recipient instigation via- an
ASK, the significance of the text, and the emphasis on solving the problem of
information science. Together, these factors seem to have resulted in an informa
tion concept which is new, directly applicable to the context of information
science, yet related to a wide range of opinion about information. It remains to
be seen, however, as with most of the information concepts reviewed here,
whether this concept can actually be useful in a practical situation.
SUMMARY
A number of investigators have recognized that a suitable concept of information
is necessary for both theoretical and practical development in information
science, and therefore have developed concepts which they consider suitable, or
have proposed that existing information concepts from other fields might be
applied to the context of information science. These concepts have used a wide
variety of initial assumptions and presuppositions, and have been developed
within a number of basic frameworks.
Some of the concepts have been based upon analysis of a communication
system, either general or specifically designed for information science, others
upon philosophical or pragmatic analysis of the information phenomenon in the
world at large, and some others on an a priori idea of how information can be
formally considered or should be considered for information science. This
variety of frameworks has led to information for information science being
variously considered as: a fundamental category such as matter; a property of
matter; structure or organization; the probability of the occurrence of an event;
reduction in the degree of uncertainty in a state of knowledge (or similar con-
82
struct); an event which takes place when a recipient encounters a text; data of
value in decision-making; public, communicated scientific information; and the
message itself. Some of the proposals have concentrated upon the question of the
effect of information, a number of them equating information with the effect on
a recipient, to varying degrees, while others have attempted to deal with the
question of an operational concept, which has often been taken to mean mathe
matically measurable.
Contributions of interest which have not been discussed here because of their
close relationship to concepts which were discussed in detail include Harmon 54
and Struder55 (general information concepts), Barnes14 (information and decision
making), and Sokolov and Mankevich33 (social information). Levine56 has pro
posed a predictive information concept for information science which I have not
included in this review because its premises and methods diverge too greatly from
the problem and requirements stated here. However, it appears to me that most
other discussions of information concepts for information science have followed
the basic pattern of one or another of the concepts discussed in this review.
What can be concluded from this review in general? First, it appears that al
though the concepts which have been proposed are quite disparate, those which
have come closest to fulfilling the requirements of an information concept for
information science have achieved their success by having been developed within
a context specific to information science (although not all agree as to what that
context is). Those proposals not limited in this way either have had great difficulty
in meeting any of the requirements of an information concept for information
science,10,39 or have denied the utility of such a concept.7 Thus, it seems that this
type ofspecification may be necessary for the development ofa useful information
concept for information science, even though there is no experimental evidence
yet available to substantiate this point.
Secondly, those concepts surveyed above which have not met the requirements
of Table 1 have usually failed because they have not met either the relevance
requirements or the operational requirements, only rarely managing to meet
some of both types. The basic problem seems to have been reconciling the need
for prediction with the seemingly individual-specific effect of information. The
concepts which seem most promising in effecting this reconciliation have been
those which have adopted a synthetic approach to the problem, using all of the
basic approaches to the issue in an attempt to solve a specific problem. It may be
that this type ofan approach, based on a cognitive communication system specific
to information science and to the problem of information science will lead to an
information concept which will be useful for information science.
Finally, although none of the information concepts surveyed has proven to be
useful in the ways discussed earlier (THE SIGNIFICANCE OF AN INFORMATION
CONCEPT), it appears that some of them, at least, have the potential to become
useful. But this potential can be realized only if these concepts are further de
veloped to remedy their weaknesses, and most important, if they are actually
applied to specific problems within information science. Such applications will
discover further problems in the concepts, which will begin the process of
development and use again. I hope that one or more of the concepts reviewed
here will provide the stimulus for beginning such a cycle, for this seems to be
the most likely path for development of a useful, unifying information concept
for information science.
83
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INFORMATION CONCEPTS FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF AN INFORMATION CONCEPT

typified by the contribution of Barnes. 14 H e relies upon the philosophy of science

1. with information in human, cognitive communication systems;

REQUIREMENTS OF AN INFORMATION CONCEPT FOR

number and range of concepts reviewed are rather small.

which is to be useful to information science. In general, any information concept

1. It must refer to information within the context of purposeful, meaningful com­

INFORMATION CONCEPTS FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE

close in subject matter. (p. 53)

tion specificity of the original information concept, which, although it should

Classifications of information concepts

subject of information science. Although this approach is suitable for proposals

The theory of selective information

In Shannon's formulation, the information source selects a desired message out

The general information phenomenon

a general science of information. He has realized some of the consequences of

Information as category and as property of matter

within a closed-system environment. Much work has been done by Soviet

relationship with objective reality. Although there are some transformations

Formal semantic information

structing AT are, in the general case, part of the recipient thesaurus, θ.

tion science by developing a model of the communication system with which

possibility of prediction on the basis of information, since the information resides

Information and uncertainty

of information science, and to be operational, and continues by developing just

Information and decision-making

operational in the context of information science, illustrating again the difficulties

Social, scientific information

1. Inseparable from physical carrier

Briefly, it meets, at least to some extent, requirements 1 and 2 through proper­

Information as knowledge surrogate

contained information concept which is specific to the purpose of information

The system is interpreted as follows: A potential generator of a text decides to

Farradane50 and structure-based concepts such as Thompson's.51 From outside

netischer undpadagogischer Sticht, Bd. 2, H . Frank (Ed.). Stuttgart-München, 1964. Cited in

(Received 2 February 1978)

1. ThellefsenMartin Muderspach, Martin Muderspach Thellefsen, ThellefsenTorkild, Torkild

12. . The Concept of Information 55-78. [Crossref]

Management 21:6, 489-499. [Crossref]

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1. It must refer to information within the context of purposeful, meaningful com

Briefly, it meets, at least to some extent, requirements 1 and 2 through proper