Faculty, Staff and Student Publications
Publication Date
2-1-2010
Journal
Journal of Biomedical Informatics
Abstract
Biomedical informatics lacks a clear and theoretically-grounded definition. Many proposed definitions focus on data, information, and knowledge, but do not provide an adequate definition of these terms. Leveraging insights from the philosophy of information, we define informatics as the science of information, where information is data plus meaning. Biomedical informatics is the science of information as applied to or studied in the context of biomedicine. Defining the object of study of informatics as data plus meaning clearly distinguishes the field from related fields, such as computer science, statistics and biomedicine, which have different objects of study. The emphasis on data plus meaning also suggests that biomedical informatics problems tend to be difficult when they deal with concepts that are hard to capture using formal, computational definitions. In other words, problems where meaning must be considered are more difficult than problems where manipulating data without regard for meaning is sufficient. Furthermore, the definition implies that informatics research, teaching, and service should focus on biomedical information as data plus meaning rather than only computer applications in biomedicine.
Keywords
Animals, Bibliometrics, Biomedical Engineering, Computational Biology, Computers, Curriculum, Humans, Interdisciplinary Communication, Knowledge, Medical Informatics, Publishing
DOI
10.1016/j.jbi.2009.08.006
PMID
19683067
PMCID
PMC2814957
PubMedCentral® Posted Date
February 2011
PubMedCentral® Full Text Version
Author MSS
Published Open-Access
yes