I define information from a philosophical perspective as a category that indicates the presence of indirect existence, which is a self-display by material entities (with direct existence) of the status and trajectory of that existence. In this paper, based in part on articles published only in Chinese over the last 30 years, information is shown to include three basic forms: In-itself, for-itself and regenerated information, which is constituted by the first two. Information in these three basic forms establishes the essence of information which is further developed in a fourth form—social information. Information is further characterized by the qualities of its three different grades, corresponding to these forms: The quality of first-grade information demonstrates direct objective existence and indirect objective existence; the quality of second-grade information demonstrates multiple levels of direct objective and indirect objective existence; the quality of third-grade information is that of the subjective relationships in human understanding that are encoded as information. The grounding of information in the ontological structure of the world gives it a central role in the approach to knowledge, constituting a new and necessary critique of the classical separation of the academic disciplines and the bases of modern philosophy.
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As debated in a recent Symposium, it is clear that there are number of different aspects to information quality but no clear agreement as to what these are. The absence of a clear understanding of qualitative informational quality criteria (such as accessibility, accuracy, availability, completeness, currency, integrity, redundancy, reliability, timeliness, trustworthiness, usability, and so forth) results in errors, confusion, impasse, and missed opportunities. Part of the difficulty lies in constructing the right conceptual as well as technical framework necessary to analyze and evaluate such criteria, and to translate them into useful applications. We believe our approach from the side of the philosophy of information has much to offer here.
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