An Information Structure Graph: A Structural Formalization of Information Semantics

Information semantics is a well-known issue in areas of information systems researches. It describes what data mean, how they are created, where they can be applied to ; thus, it provides indispensable information for management of data. This article proposes to formalize information semantics by the processes that data are created or transformed. A scheme is proposed to describe an information production structure, which is called an information structure graph. An information structure graph is a directed graph, whose leaves are primary input data objects and whose root and internal nodes are output objects. Information semantics is derived from an information structure graph that has data as its root. For this, rules are proposed to manipulate and compare graphs. The structural relationships among information structure graphs are mapped into semantic relationships among data.