Information science was named in 1955, but its questions date back to Assyria
The phrase information science first appeared in 1955, yet people were analysing and organising knowledge at least as far back as the Assyrian Empire. Today the field studies how information is gathered, classified, stored, found and protected, borrowing from computing, library science and psychology all at once.
At its core the discipline covers the whole life cycle of information: collecting, classifying, manipulating, storing, retrieving, moving, spreading and securing it. It has always been transdisciplinary. Technical strands draw on computer science, data science, information theory and statistics; organisational strands on library and archival science and knowledge representation; human strands on human-computer interaction, cognitive psychology and information ethics.
A definition from 1968, the year the American Documentation Institute renamed itself the American Society for Information Science, describes the field as studying the properties and behaviour of information, the forces governing its flow and the best ways to process it so people can reach and use it. Its practitioners tend to start from the needs of the people involved and tackle whole systems rather than single gadgets. Many universities now have dedicated schools, and several have formed an I-School Caucus.
Terminology is tangled. Soviet scholars led by A. I. Mikhailov in the mid-1960s used informatics for the study of scientific information, and some writers still treat informatics and information science as synonyms. In the United States the term informatics emerged partly as computer scientists' way of distinguishing themselves from library science, while in Britain it came to mean a science of both natural and engineered information-processing systems. Brian Vickery's 1973 book placed information systems within the field too.
One key tool is the ontology, a formal model of a domain built from types, properties and relationships, famously described as an explicit specification of a shared conceptualisation. Ontologies structure knowledge for artificial intelligence, the Semantic Web, biomedical informatics and library catalogues. Applications now reach health and bioinformatics, digital humanities, geographic information, cybersecurity and learning analytics, and the careers range from information scientists supporting research teams to systems analysts redesigning business processes. Critics such as Ingwersen note that the field struggles to mark its boundaries with neighbouring disciplines.
Source: Information science
