Information is selection—a review of basics shows substantial potential for improvement of digital information representation

Abstract

Any piece of information is a selection from a set of possibilities. In this paper, this set is called a "domain". Digital information consists of number sequences, which are selections from a domain. At present, these number sequences are defined contextually in a very variable way, which impairs their comparability. Therefore, global uniformly defined "domain vectors" (DVs), with a structure containing a "Uniform Locator" ("UL"), referred to as "UL plus number sequence", are proposed. The "UL" is an efficient global pointer to the uniform online definition of the subsequent number sequence. DVs are globally defined, identified, comparable, and searchable by criteria which users can define online. In medicine, for example, patients, doctors, and medical specialists can define DVs online and can, therefore, form global criteria which are important for certain diagnoses. This allows for the immediate generation of precise diagnostic specific statistics of "similar medical cases", in order to discern the best therapy. The introduction of a compact DV data structure may substantially improve the digital representation of medical information.