Wolfgang Lenski

Information: A Conceptual Investigation

This paper is devoted to a study of the concept of information. We first situate the concept of information within the context of other philosophical concepts. However, an analysis of the concept of knowledge turns out to be the key when clarifying the concept of information. Our investigations produce the ‘missing link’ for the “severely neglected connection between theories of information and theories of knowledge” (Capurro/Hjorland). The results presented here clarify what information is and have the potential to provide answers to several of Floridi’s “open problems in the philosophy of information”.

Towards a Theory of Information

A solid foundation is a prerequisite for a scientific discipline to provide a modelling framework for the representation purposes in other areas. In this paper we discuss the suitabiliy of logic for this kind of application and investigate the necessary steps for the concept of ‘information’ to provide a comparably justified foundation for the modelling of ‘real world’ phenomena. This provides an analysis of the conceptual prerequisites that are required for a well-founded theory of information.

A Planning-Based Approach to Intelligent Information Retrieval in Text Databases

Seeking information in text databases is a complex activity. It requires a variety of knowledge from the user. With the application of techniques from Artificial Intelligence we try to improve the retrieval effectiveness of traditional information retrieval systems (IRS). In particular, in the COBRA system we study the use of planning techniques for the control of the knowledge-based information retrieval process, the transformation of the search terms into the descriptors known to the system and their conceptual reformulation, and the generation of the search plan for the IRS. We define the approach in COBRA as cooperative planning for the information seeking process.

Morals, IT-Structures, and Society

Based on Neuser’s conception of knowledge (Neuser, Wissen begreifen. Zur Selbstorganisation von Erfahrung, Handlung und Begriff. Springer, Heidelberg, 2013) a new characterization of morals is given which transfers the structure of knowledge to morals. This transformation is designed in a way such that the dynamic role of the inner functionalities is preserved. As a consequence a methodology evolves which explains the rise of morals in a society and at the same time identifies the factors that govern its internal dynamics. Especially, the influences of it-structures and technologies on the rise and change of morality can then be clearly understood. This approach thus prepares the conceptual grounds for questions of orientation, self-reassurance, and self-positioning of a society in view of the technological development.

Structured Phrases for Indexing and Retrieval of Research Topics

This paper presents a new approach to improve the quality of information systems in scientific domains. Based on an analysis of the form of metadata descriptions of research results we develop a model which uses structured phrase-respresentations instead of keyword-based methodologies for indexing and retrieval.

A Method for the Detection of Sources in the Logic Information System LIS

The present paper focuses the problem of automatically entering new citations into the database of the Logic Information System Lis which constitutes the technical basis for the research project Bibliography of Mathematical Logic and Related Fields of the Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften. A new method combining techniques from information retrieval and case-based reasoning is presented to process external source information and to transform given citations into the highly structured and categorized database of the enterprise.

DECIDABILITY RESULTS FOR CLASSES OF ORDERED ABELIAN GROUPS IN LOGICS WITH RAMSEY-QUANTIFIERS

This article is to contribute to the model theory of ordered abelian groups in logics with additional quantifiers Q α n . The quantifiers Q α n are the so-called Malitz quantifiers introduced in [27] as generalizations of cardinality quantifiers. For a survey of properties of these extended logics we refer to [2].

Universally generic finitely generated ordered Abelian groups

It is shown that a finitely generated ordered Abelian group is generic if and only if it is superdiscrete, i.e., each homomorphic image is discretely ordered. The forcing concept uses universal sentences as forcing conditions.