I went through the July and October issues of Informatics. It was really nice reading through all the items — very nicely compiled and laid out. Congratulations for bringing out a very good newsletter.
I would like to know the exact meaning of the word "Informatics" — it is not listed in the dictionary. Are Informatics and Information Science the same or is there something more to it?
Srinivas, from Agriculture Information System Division, NIC.
In Reply
The basic definition of the term "informatics" as given by Mikhailov, Chernyi and Giliarevski in their original Russian publication "Osnovi Informatiki", (Foundation of Informatics) 1968, and translated by NJ Belkin in his paper on Information for Informatics presented at a conference held by the Aslib Co-ordinate Indexing Group during March 25-27, 1974, at New College, Oxford, is:
"Informatics is the learned discipline which studies the structure and properties (but not the actual contents) of scholarly information, and the laws governing scholarly information activity, its theory, history, methodology and organization. The goal of informatics is the discovery of the optimum methods and means of representation, collection, storage, retrieval and dissemination of scholarly information. Informatics has to do with meaningful (semantic) information, but not with qualitative appraisal of that information. Such appraisals can be carried out only by specialists in the particular scholarly discipline or particular activity."
Belkin clarifies that the term "scholarly" in the definition, is taken in a wide enough sense to include practical administrative activities, for instance. This point is important because it implies that, for example, genetic information or the information of statistical communication theory, are not the sort of information with which informatics deals. Belkin deduces.
Belkin however differentiates between Information Science and Informatics purely on the ground that informatics was yet to attain the status of a science (that was way back in 1974) and hence could not be termed as Information Science. However, in the last two decades, with the great advances in computer and communication technology, Informatics has come of its own and can safely be considered a science by itself.
A new approach has however been adopted in defining "Informatics". This is in terms of the concept of Information Technology. The National Informatics Centre's information handbook on DISNIC defines Information Technology as "a science of collecting, storing, processing and transmitting information". Informatics is then defined as "the combination of Information Technology (IT) and applications coupled with Telecommunication".
Maria Giaoutzi and Peter Nijkamp, in Informatics and Regional Development, come out with a clearer definition combining all the above elements:
"The scientific and commercial use and management of modern information systems (in terms of hardware, software and orgware) requires a systematic and coherent collection, storage and transmission of new knowledge (based on integrated network patterns) and will be called here (in the book) Informatics."