Information and Information Systems

The purpose of an information system is to collect, store, process and distribute information. The concept of information is itself not well understood. It is in some sense a relative concept, rather than an absolute one. That is, a data object is assumed to contain information if the receiver of the data interprets it in such a way that the received data adds to the knowledge of the receiver. Even if the concepts of information, data, and knowledge are interrelated in some sense, the relationships are not fully understood. There is also, so far, no complete theory of information.