Dear FISers, Pedro raises several points. Among them:
1. "Chemoinformatics" or "Cheminformatics" ? Both terms are encountered. I would say that unless some authority takes a decision, both terms will continue to be used. 2. Despite I gave an example of what could be cheminformation in a concrete case, I did not tell what was exactly cheminformation in this concrete case. I just asked the question of what it could be. Now, I ask you the following: please can you provide an extremely simple example (the most simple you could imagine) of situation in which you can say: << in this situation, information is ... >>. Chemical information is welcome, but an example from physics would be great, too. However, please, no biology example, that will be dicussed at the occasion of a future session. These examples are expected to help us to define information in more general situations. 3. The comparison Pedro did with symmetry is of interest: can anyone define symmetry ? During a long time, symmetry had in common with information that many people attempted to define it in its own field, giving raise to many particular definitions, but not to a common and widely accepted one. Some years ago, although I needed to mention a definition of symmetry in one of my papers, I was surprised that I could not find an unifying one (symmetry is known since millenaries!!). Even in the book of Weyl I did not find the expected one. So, I decided to build my own one (Symmetry: Culture and Science, 2007, 18[2-3], 99-119; free reprint at http://petitjeanmichel.free.fr/itoweb.paper.SCS.2007). See also: http://petitjeanmichel.free.fr/itoweb.petitjean.html In fact, the group structure which is generally a priori imposed, is a consequence of several properties that the definition should satisfy to be in agreement with some obvious intuitive requirements (and so, five different groups appear naturally, none of them being imposed a priori). Of course, the proposed unifying definition applies to a broad spectrum of situations, not only the geometric one: matrices, functions, distributions, graphs, etc. But that was possible because I already had knowledge of the many definitions in particular domains or situations. Thus I expect that that you will post several examples of information in very simples cases. From the analysis of these situations we should move forward. E.g., for symmetry, one of the simple examples I gave was the set of three points of the real line: if one point is the mid of the two other, there is symmetry (in fact, it is a case of achirality, i.e. indirect symmetry, because here we deal with reflections rather than with rotations). It would be great to have so simple situations for information in chemistry or physics. Thanks by advance, ll my best, Michel. _______________________________________________ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
