INFORMATION PROCESSING

the acquisition, recording, organization, retrieval, display, and dissemination of information. In recent years, the term has often been applied to computer-based operations specifically. In popular usage, the term information refers to facts and opinions provided and received during the course of daily life: one obtains information directly from other living beings, from mass media, from electronic data banks, and from all sorts of observable phenomena in the surrounding environment. A person using such facts and opinions generates more information, some of which is communicated to others during discourse, by instructions, in letters and documents, and through other media. Information organized according to some logical relationships is referred to as a body of knowledge, to be acquired by systematic exposure or study. Application of knowledge (or skills) yields expertise, and additional analytical or experiential insights are said to constitute instances of wisdom. Use of the term information is not restricted exclusively to its communication via natural language. Information is also registered and communicated through art and by facial expressions and gestures or by such other physical responses as shivering. Moreover, every living entity is endowed with information in the form of a genetic code. These information phenomena permeate the physical and mental world, and their variety is such that it has defied so far all attempts at a unified definition of information. Interest in information phenomena has increased dramatically in the 20th century, and today they are the objects of study in a number of disciplines, including philosophy, physics, biology, linguistics, information and computer science, electronic and communications engineering, management science, and the social sciences. On the commercial side, the information service industry has become one of the newer industries worldwide. Almost all other industriesmanufacturing and serviceare increasingly concerned with information and its handling. The different, though often overlapping, viewpoints and phenomena of these fields lead to different (and sometimes conflicting) concepts and definitions of information. This article touches on such concepts, particularly as they relate to information processing and information systems. In treating the basic elements of information processing, it distinguishes between information in analog and digital form, and it describes their acquisition, recording, organization, retrieval, display, and dissemination. In treating information systems, the article discusses system analysis and design and provides a descriptive taxonomy of the main system types. Some attention is also given to the social impact of information systems and to the field of information science. the acquisition, recording, organization, retrieval, display, and dissemination of information. In recent years, the term has often been applied to computer-based operations specifically. During the past few centuries great advances have been made in the human capability to record, store, and reproduce information, beginning with the invention of printing from movable type in 1450, followed by the development of photography and telephony, and culminating in the mass production of electronic digital computers in the latter half of the 20th century. New technologies for preserving and transmitting aural and visual information (e.g., digital audio tape, optical disc storage, and optical fibres) have further enhanced information processing. The high-speed digital computer, together with its peripheral equipment, provides an extremely efficient means of manipulating and modifying stored data. As a consequence, information systems based on such computers are able to carry out diverse tasks. They can, for example, perform scientific and engineering calculations, translate technical material from one natural language to another, conduct searches of bibliographic literature, provide tutorial instruction in various subjects, assist in design and manufacturing activities, or make decisions for solving complex nonnumerical problems (e.g., those related to medical diagnosis or mineral exploration) with so-called expert software systems. Moreover, the utility of computer systems is greatly enhanced by their ability to communicate with one another through computer networks, provided that the proper communications connections have been established and the computer data files and programs have been modified to agree with a common communications protocol. All of these technological advances together have made information a new basic resource, ranking alongside material and energy resources in importance. There are, in fact, those who believe that control of information stores and processing facilities may well become more important than natural resources as a source of social and economic power. The primary vehicles for the purposeful, orchestrated processing of information are information systemsconstructs that collect, organize, store, process, and display information in all its forms (raw data, interpreted data, knowledge, and expertise) and formats (text, video, and voice). In principle, any record-keeping systeme.g., an address book or a train schedulemay be regarded as an information system. What sets modern information systems apart is their electronic dimension, which permits extremely fast, automated manipulation of digitally stored data and their transformation from and to analog representation. Impact of information technology Electronic information systems are a phenomenon of the second half of the 20th century. Their evolution is closely tied with advances in two basic technologies: integrated circuits and digital communications. Integrated circuits are silicon chips containing transistors that store and process information. Advances in the design of these chips, which were first developed in 1958, are responsible for an exponential increase in the cost performance of computer components. For more than two decades the capacity of the basic integrated circuit, the dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chip, has doubled consistently in intervals of less than two years: from 1,000 transistors (1 kilobit) per chip in 1970 to 1,000,000 (1 megabit) in 1987, 16 megabits in 1993, and 1,000,000,000 (1 gigabit) predicted for the year 2000. A gigabit chip has the capacity of 125,000,000 bytes, approximately equivalent to 14,500 pages, or more than 12 volumes, of Encyclopdia Britannica. The speed of microprocessor chips, measured in millions of instructions per second (MIPS), is also increasing near-exponentially: from 10 MIPS in 1985 to 100 MIPS in 1993, with 1,000 MIPS predicted for 1995. By the year 2000 a single chip may process 64 billion instructions per second. If in a particular computing environment in 1993 a chip supported 10 simultaneous users, in the year 2000 such a chip could theoretically support several thousand users. Full exploitation of these developments for the realm of information systems requires comparable advances in software disciplines. Their major contribution has been to open the use of computer technology to persons other than computer professionals. Interactive applications in the office and home have been made possible by the development of easy-to-use software products for the creation, maintenance, manipulation, and querying of files and records. The database has become a central organizing framework for many information systems, taking advantage of the concept of data independence, which allows data sharing among diverse applications. Database management system (DBMS) software today incorporates high-level programming facilities that do not require one to specify in detail how the data should be processed. The programming discipline as a whole, however, progresses in an evolutionary manner. Whereas semiconductor field advances are measured by orders of magnitude, the writing and understanding of large suites of software that characterize complex information systems progress more slowly. The complexity of the data processes that comprise very large information systems has so far eluded major breakthroughs, and the cost-effectiveness of the software development sector improves only gradually. The utility of computers is vastly augmented by their ability to communicate with one another, so as to share data and its processing. Local-area networks (LANs) permit the sharing of data, programs, printers, and electronic mail within offices and buildings. In wide-area networks, such as the Internet, which connect thousands of computers around the globe, computer-to-computer communication uses a variety of media as transmission lineselectric-wire audio circuits, coaxial cables, radio and microwaves (as in satellite communication), and, most recently, optical fibres. The latter are replacing coaxial cable in the Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN), which is capable of carrying digital information in the form of voice, text, and video simultaneously. To communicate with another machine, a computer requires data circuit-terminating equipment, or DCE, which connects it to the transmission line. When an analog line such as a dial-up telephone line is used, the DCE is called a modem (for modulator/demodulator); it also provides the translation of the digital signal to analog and vice versa. By using data compression, the relatively inexpensive high-speed modems currently in use can transmit data at speeds of more than 100 kilobits per second. When digital lines are used, the DCE allows substantially higher speeds; for instance, the U.S. scholarly network NSFNET, set up by the National Science Foundation, transmits information at 45 million bits per second. The National Research and Education Network, proposed by the U.S. government in 1991, is designed to send data at speeds in the gigabit-per-second range, comfortably moving gigantic volumes of text, video, and sound across a web of digital highways. Computer networks are complex entities. Each network operates according to a set of procedures called the network protocol. The proliferation of incompatible protocols during the early 1990s has been brought under relative control by the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) reference Model formulated by the International Organization for Standardization. To the extent that individual protocols conform to the OSI recommendations, computer networks can now be interconnected efficiently through gateways. Computer networking facilitates the current trend toward distributed information systems. At the corporate level, the central database may be distributed over a number of computer systems in different locations, yet its querying and updating are carried out simultaneously against the composite database. An individual searching for public-access information can traverse disparate computer networks to peruse hundreds of autonomous databases and within seconds or minutes download a copy of the desired document into a personal workstation. The future of information systems may be gleaned from several areas of current research. As all information carriers (text, video, and sound) can be converted to digital form and manipulated by increasingly sophisticated techniques, the ranges of media, functions, and capabilities of information systems are constantly expanding. Evolving techniques of natural-language processing and understanding, knowledge representation, and neural process modeling have begun to join the more traditional repertoire of methods of content analysis and manipulation. The use of these techniques opens the possibility of eliciting new knowledge from existing data, such as the discovery of a previously unknown medical syndrome or of a causal relationship in a disease. Computer visualization, a new field that has grown expansively since the early 1990s, deals with the conversion of masses of data emanating from instruments, databases, or computer simulations into visual displaysthe most efficient method of human information reception, analysis, and exchange. Related to computer visualization is the research area of virtual reality or virtual worlds, which denotes the generation of synthetic environments through the use of three-dimensional displays and interaction devices. A number of research directions in this area are particularly relevant to future information systems: knowledge-based world modeling; the development of physical analogues for abstract quantitative and organizational data; and search and retrieval in large virtual worlds. The cumulative effect of these new research areas is a gradual transformation of the role of information systems from that of data processing to that of cognition aiding. Present-day computers are remarkably versatile machines capable of assisting humans in nearly every problem-solving task that involves symbol manipulations. Television, on the other hand, has penetrated societies throughout the world as a noninteractive display device for combined video and audio signals. The impending convergence of three digital technologiesnamely, the computer, very-high-definition television (V-HDTV), and ISDN data communicationsis all but inevitable. In such a system, a large-screen multimedia display monitor, containing a 64-megabit primary memory and a billion-byte hard disk for data storage and playback, would serve as a computer and, over ISDN fibre links, an interactive television receiver. Additional reading Concepts of information and information systems A wide-ranging discussion by 39 scientists on the nature and goals of the information, computer, communication, and systems sciences appears in Fritz Machlup and Una Mansfield (eds.), The Study of Information: Interdisciplinary Messages (1983). Fundamental concepts of information representation and processes are dealt with, sometimes speculatively, in Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind (1986); Roger C. Schank, Conceptual Information Processing (1975); Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon, Human Problem Solving (1972); Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 2nd ed., rev. and enlarged (1981); and Ronald J. Brachman, Hector J. Levesque, and Raymond Reiter (eds.), Knowledge Representation (1992). Brje Langenfors and Bo Sundgren, Information Systems Architecture (1975), explores fundamental aspects of structure and design. The impact of information technology on making human recorded knowledge available was first visualized in Vannevar Bush, As We May Think, Atlantic Monthly, 176:101108 (July 1945). Theodor Holm Nelson, Literary Machines, edition 90.1 (1990), presents a vision of a literary hyperspace in which digital representations of ideas, images, and sound are recombined at will. Reference sources can be useful for independent study of the subject, especially Dennis Longley and Michael Shain, Van Nostrand Reinhold Dictionary of Information Technology, 3rd ed. (1989); and Anthony Ralston and Edwin D. Reilly (eds.), Encyclopedia of Computer Science, 3rd ed. (1993), for the professional reader. Information processing Jens Rasmussen, Information Processing and Human-Machine Interaction: An Approach to Cognitive Engineering (1986); and Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores, Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design (1986), address interface issues arising in computer processing. A comprehensive, basic survey is offered in Steven L. Mandell, Computers and Information Processing: Concepts and Applications, 6th ed. (1992). C. Gordon Bell and John E. Mcnamara, High-Tech Ventures: The Guide for Entrepreneurial Success (1992), includes an insightful analysis of the trends in information technology. Carlo Batini, Stefano Ceri, and Shamkant B. Navathe, Conceptual Database Design: An Entity-Relationship Approach (1992), offers technical but highly readable coverage of this central area of information systems engineering. Computerized management of text is well covered in Gerard Salton, Automatic Text Processing: The Transformation, Analysis, and Retrieval of Information by Computer (1988); and traditional methods of searching text receive thorough treatment in Gerard Salton and Michael J. Mcgill, Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval (1983). Systematic, technical descriptions of computer processing of nontextual signal carriers appear in Pankaj K. Das, Optical Signal Processing (1991); and Walt Tetschner, Voice Processing, 2nd ed. (1992); and descriptions of multimedia image signals in Craig A. Lindley, Practical Image Processing in C: Acquisition, Manipulation, Storage (1991). The emphasis of James D. Foley et al., Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice, 2nd ed. (1990), is on human-machine interaction in this field of computer applications; the theory, practice, and future of virtual worlds is discussed in Howard Rheingold , Virtual Reality (1991). Martin P. Clark, Networks and Telecommunications: Design and Operation (1991), is a readable introduction to the fundamentals of computer networks, their design, and their management. Natural language understanding, expert systems, and robotics are explained competently in Patrick Henry Winston, Artificial Intelligence, 3rd ed. (1992). An engrossing introduction to information-processing applications that enable artistic expression is given in Stephen Wilson, Using Computers to Create Art (1986). Organizational information systems James I. Cash, Jr., F. Warren Mcfarlan, and James L. Mckenney, Corporate Information Systems Management: The Issues Facing Senior Executives, 3rd ed. (1992), is recommended reading for managers having responsibility for corporate information processing. An increasing list of monographs centres on the issue of cost-effectiveness of corporate information processing and computinge.g., Marilyn M. Parker and Robert J. Benson, Information Economics: Linking Business Performance to Information Technology (1988); Paul A. Strassmann, The Business Value of Computers (1990); and Richard Veryard (ed.), The Economics of Information Systems and Software (1991). The continuous evolution of information technologies requires a disciplined approach to their use in the office, argues Charles Ray, Janet Palmer, and Amy D. Wohl, Office Automation: A Systems Approach, 2nd ed. (1991). David D. Bedworth, Mark R. Henderson, and Philip M. Wolfe, Computer-Integrated Design and Manufacturing (1991), offers a detailed description of computer-assisted functions in a manufacturing enterprise. Public information utilities The broad view of library networking in the United States given in Susan K. Martin, Library Networks, 198687: Libraries in Partnership (1986), remains representative of current trends. Cooperative arrangements in Europe are discussed in Karl Wilhelm Neubauer and Esther K. Dyer (eds.), European Library Networks (1990). Access guides to information resources in printed form are exemplified by Ellis Mount and Beatrice Kovacs, Using Science and Technology Information Sources (1991). Since the publication of J.S. Quarterman, The Matrix: Computer Networks and Conferencing Systems Worldwide (1990), the growth in the number and variety of electronic information resources has been so astonishing that guides to these resources are maintained predominantly in electronic form. Among the published monographs are Matthew Rapaport, Computer Mediated Communications: Bulletin Boards, Computer Conferencing, Electronic Mail, and Information Retrieval (1991), attesting to the growing popularity of informal communications via digital media; Ed Krol, The Whole Internet: User's Guide & Catalog (1992), offering comprehensive instructions for accessing the rapidly evolving virtual library of the world; and Michael Strangelove and Diane Kovacs (compilers), Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters, and Academic Discussion Lists, 2nd ed. (1992), pointing the reader to the newest forms of documents and communications (which includes a growing repertoire of classical literature in digital form). Readers interested in the plans of the U.S. information community may consult Association Of Research Libraries, Linking Researchers and Resources: The Emerging Information Infrastructure and the NREN Proposal (1990); the Canadian vision is described in Gary Cleveland, Research Networks and Libraries: Applications and Issues for a Global Information Network (1991). Impact of information systems Seminal studies of the information era include Fritz Machlup, Knowledge: Its Creation, Distribution, and Economic Significance, 3 vol. (198084); Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (1973); Marc Uri Porat and Michael Rogers Rubin, The Information Economy, 9 vol. (1977); and Michael Rogers Rubin, Mary Taylor Huber, and Elizabeth Lloyd Taylor, The Knowledge Industry in the United States, 19601980 (1986). For an example of parallel studies in Great Britain, see Ian Miles, Mapping and Measuring the Information Economy (1990). Early French views of the societal effects of the marriage of computers and telecommunications were presented in Simon Nora and Alain Minc, The Computerization of Society: A Report to the President of France (1980; originally published in French, 1978). A more recent Japanese view is summarized in Taichi Sakaiya, The Knowledge-Value Revolution; or, A History of the Future (1991; originally published in Japanese, 1985). Jack Meadows (ed.), Information Technology and the Individual (1991), discusses a range of societal implications of the technology. The importance of preserving individual freedoms in the information age is argued eloquently in Ithiel De Sola Pool, Technologies of Freedom (1983). Philip Fites, Peter Johnston, and Martin Kratz, The Computer Virus Crisis, 2nd ed. (1992), shows the dimensions of one of the hazards to be faced by corporate and public information networks in the years to come. Arthur R. Miller and Michael H. Davis, Intellectual Property: Patents, Trademarks, and Copyright in a Nutshell, 2nd ed. (1990), elaborates on issues of property rights in information. Bibliographic sources Useful series of printed reviews in information science include Annual Review of Information Science and Technology; Advances in Computers (irregular); and Advances in Artificial Intelligence in Software Engineering (annual). Major abstracting journals in computing include Computing Reviews (monthly); ACM Guide to Computing Literature (annual); Computer Literature Index (quarterly); Computer Abstracts (monthly); and Computer Book Review (monthly), surveying new publications in a broad range of subjects on computing. Useful secondary sources that list publications dealing with information science and systems include Information Science Abstracts (monthly); and Library & Information Science Abstracts (monthly), containing abstracts of literature on librarianship and archives, documentation, publishing, dissemination of information, and mass communications. Vladimir Slamecka