Informatics - the science of information, the practice of data & information processing, and the engineering of information systems. Informatics encompasses studies the structure, behaviour, and interactions of natural and artificial systems that store, process, and communicate data & information. Informatics has its own conceptual and theoretical foundations, and has computational, cognitive, and social aspects, including the study of the social impact of information technologies.
Informatics is developing rapidly in response to:
o An evolving need for researchers to discover, access, and understand data from outside their own discipline in order to deal with more complex problems.
o Greater urgency - demands for faster response times and rapid access to data & information.
o The need to store, make accessible, and distill an ever-increasing volume of Earth & space observation data; a growing need for processing and user applications to run at the data source.
o The need for software to be available as shared, open source services. (Accessing and analyzing data can be the most time-consuming and costly part of the data-to-information chain.)
o Growing readiness by Governments to support a science information commons[1] as an effective and efficient way to provide societal benefits; wider recognition of the value to Society of open access to and reuse of data & information.
o The power and availability of modern ICT capabilities.
Three sub-divisions of informatics are emerging, forming a sequence from ICT infrastructure systems to science and knowledge generation:
The traditional pillars of the scientific method are observation+experiment, theory, and computation. Modern ICT capabilities now allow us to address a new class of problems and applications – problems that revolve around the organization of data & information leading to knowledge extraction. Examples are recent advances in astronomy, medical science, and hazard risk assessment. Such new capabilities allow science to deliver benefits to society that were not possible before, particularly in areas, such as climate change, that involve understanding and modelling the behaviour of complex systems that are not confined to disciplinary boundaries. The information revolution is changing radically the way we conduct our science, and it is little exaggeration to say that informatics has already become the fourth pillar of the scientific method.
[1] An information commons is an environment in which data & information are openly available for everyone to use, either freely or at the marginal cost. The term has arisen by analogy with the traditional agricultural commons – land that was shared by the whole community.
Keywords: cyberinfrastructure, e-science, informatics