Vision of Information Science Inspired by a New Representational Formalism
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Abstract
A recently developed formalism for structural representation—called Evolving Transformations System (ETS)—is discussed as suggesting a radically different direction for the development of computer/information science. One can gain an initial intuitive understanding of the ETS object representation by generalizing the temporal process of the (Peano) construction of natural numbers: replace the single ‘structureless’ unit out of which a number is built by one of several more general
structural units. The new formalism points to the informational view of nature in which the basic object encoding is temporal, event-based, while the ubiquitous in science ‘spatial’ object instantiation can be constructed on the basis of the former. Thus, this far-reaching structural generalization of natural numbers emerges as a universal form of both temporal and structural representation that can be variously instantiated, depending on the desired target medium, e.g. 3D-space, biotic, network, etc. Moreover, the ETS representation satisfies a unique and very desirable property not possessed by any other known language, scientific or spoken: its syntax and semantics are congruent.
Keywords: new representational formalism, structural representation, class-oriented representational formalism, congruence of syntax and semantics