An Information
- That which resolves uncertainty; anything that answers the question of "what a given entity is".
- Things that are or can be known about a given topic; communicable knowledge of something. [from 14th c.]
- The act of informing or imparting knowledge; notification. [from 14th c.]
- (law) A statement of criminal activity brought before a judge or magistrate; in the UK, used to inform a magistrate of an offence and request a warrant; in the US, an accusation brought before a judge without a grand jury indictment. [from 15th c.]
- (obsolete) The act of informing against someone, passing on incriminating knowledge; accusation. [14th-17th c.]
- (now rare) The systematic imparting of knowledge; education, training. [from 14th c.]
- (now rare) The creation of form; the imparting of a given quality or characteristic; forming, animation. [from 17th c.]
- (computing) […] the meaning that a human assigns to data by means of the known conventions used in its representation.
- (Christianity) Divine inspiration. [from 15th c.]
- A service provided by telephone which provides listed telephone numbers of a subscriber. [from 20th c.]
- (information theory) Any unambiguous abstract data, the smallest possible unit being the bit. [from 20th c.]
- As contrasted with data, information is processed to extract relevant data. [from late 20th c.]
- (information technology) Any ordered sequence of symbols (or signals) (that could contain a message). [from late 20th c.]
| Usage notes |
The definition of information in the computing context is from an international standard vocabulary which, though formally accepted, is largely ignored by the computing profession.[1]