In the face of the challenges of a global knowledge society based on new technologies, infonomics are increasingly gaining importance as a future-oriented connection of economics and information sciences.
Innovative technology businesses which put new research findings into practice need a service platform which incorporates various disciplines of information sciences under the umbrella of infonomics.
Based on openness and the alliance of technology companies, academic institutions, public institutions, and non-profit organizations, a future Infonomic Center will provide industry, business, and research with an interdisciplinary intersection for the information economies of the 21st century.
Over the last fifty years, information technology has transformed the world by vastly increasing the utility and scope of "data". These changes exert a powerful force on society and will continue. Information technology has spawned the internet, Wikipedia, file-sharing, and supercomputers. The prospects for the next fifty years are even more impressive, because information technology will redefine our understanding of "human knowledge" in profound ways.
The science of infonomics is concerned with the new modalities of research, learning, teaching and knowing. By its very nature, infonomics is an interdisciplinary and integrating science, and boundaries are blurred. Infonomics feeds on insights from engineers, educators, psychologists, sociologists, librarians, demographers, and entrepreneurs. The ambition and scope of the field defy a clear or comprehensive definition, but the following illustrative points stake out the terrain:
- infonomics is the science of the organization and assessment of human knowledge in networks of people and machines
- the subject of infonomics includes information on information, processing of codified knowledge, and making knowledge more accessible
- infonomics involves and integrates a large variety of fields of expertise
- infonomics finds the most interesting questions where traditional subjects and categories overlap
Computer scientists create the technology for amassing large amounts of data, including personal and medical data, and data on social networks. The practice of data-mining-- extraction of correlations and features -- is an active field of growing sophistication. Manufacturers and politicians resort to data-mining of consumer records in a competition for reaching an increasingly diverse and organized audience. Participants in modern life - individuals and organizations - command cheap communication- and documentation infrastructure for collaboration and publicity.
All participants are faced with a broad spectrum of facilities for maintaining social networks around projects and products. Documentation and openness foster success, exposure and reputation, but how far is it supposed to go? Individuals and organizations must balance internal and external, private and public, shared and proprietary, convenience and privacy -- a delicate affair that is as yet largely unexplored. What's more, individuals and organizations must protect their communication channels and repositories from deception and manipulation by technical and other means.
When viewed from the perspective of the scientist or engineer, we find that technology not only accelerates the centuries-old practices of documentation, peer-review, discourse, citation, indexing and life-long learning, it also brings them to large parts of the population. The resulting data repositories are immense and can't be navigated anymore without the aid of machines. Information retrieval, semantic web and cheap, large-scale processing utilities promise a new, significantly automated, form of library science.
All these and related future developments require the attention and collaboration of engineers, librarians, sociologists and many other disciplines. Without it, our society won't remain steersman of human knowledge and its (potentially sensitive) data.
The term "infonomics" covers the technical, economic and systematic intersections of knowledge representation, communication, semantic data processing and data-mining – deliberately broad concepts here.
Infonomics is the result of this century's progress in information technology. Publishing for promotion, perception management, manipulation or citation is not reserved for researchers, journalists and artists anymore; it is open to everyone and is practiced by and within many organizations. This has a pronounced influence on modern industry, which has become a battle of the wits, a competition of learning, teaching, and publishing. The ability to increase, find, acquire, share, and utilize knowledge makes or breaks careers, companies, even countries. Infonomics is the science of this process and how to improve it. If anything, the ultimate aim of infonomics could be this: to enable every human being on earth to participate, to make each of us an infonomist.