On Navigating in Information Spaces

The concept of information is not yet perfectly integrated into our modern science. As a tentative approach the concept of information space is proposed here. An information space consists of elementary semantically meaningful statements (or interpretable structures) together with specific relations between these elements. Relations can either be seen in analogy to the links known from hypertext systems, or they are defined by similarity relations between the elements. Both the elements and the relations can be modified in the course of time, and possible paths through such a space (navigation) are discussed together with their effects on the underlying structures. The mathematics of similarity relations and their context dependence are studied in some detail. The structures proposed here can be modeled on a standard PC; possible applications are sketched.