Dear Michel and FIS colleagues, Thanks for the very accurate Intro. I am reluctant to discuss about biological information right now, as there are other aspects you have dealt with that deserve further discussion. The story itself is funny: the way new fields of multidisciplinary origins have to swim against the strong forces of institutional "viscosity" --probably the stunning success of bioinformatics also contributed to the revival of cheminfo in France (and elsewhere). That's fodder for my "scientomics" perspective, the interpenetration or recombination of fields as the usual origin of new disciplines ... by the way, the proper term in English should be Chemoinformatics or Cheminformatics? I have seen both in the literature.
The relationship between scientific practice, Data Mining (DM) and Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) is another crucial informational aspect you enter. Where is information? For my taste, every major discipline has provided its own answer, but implicitly, and that contributes to the impossibility to give a consistent answer to your questions about that. The discussion could be too long, beyond my typing possibilities today... I think however that bioinformation can give some serious points precisely by means of DM and KDD related tools --my bet is that the technology of "microarrays" in systems biology and bionformatics will be able to tell us what is "meaning" at the cellular scale. But an in depth discussion of the chemical background would be needed. Continuing with Gavin's --there is a grain of truth in some of his rejections-- precisely I see Info Science as the attempt to achieve multidisciplinary consistency around the whole familiy of info concepts, even probably assuming that info itself cannot be defined, although you can measure it, process it, etc. That's not pejorative, can anyone define "time", or "symmetry"? Biologically speaking there is not much to discuss: metabolism is what our cells "eat", signaling is about the "information they "read" from the environment. It is written in chemicals, like our newspapers (in ink), but cells do not eat it, the same way we do not eat newspapers (unless in onion paper!). Veteran Fisers will remember a funny exchange with Igor many years ago, Father Brown related... best wishes --Pedro ------------------------------------------------- Pedro C. Marijuán Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud Avda. Gómez Laguna, 25, Pl. 11ª 50009 Zaragoza, Spain Telf: 34 976 71 3526 (& 6818) Fax: 34 976 71 5554 pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/ ------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
