| The notion of 'information' is probably the most important and the most fundamental one for the discipline of information systems. Whether realising it or not, people's understanding of this notion guides and affects their theoretic study and application of information systems. However, there appear many inconsistent and often conflicting views and terms for information, data and meaning in the literature Such a situation seems to have resulted in the body of knowledge in this field being an inconsistent and confusing mixture. Thus far, there does not seem a systematic and convincing solution to the problem that the nature of information is elusive and extremely hard to handle. Therefore, any serious investigation into the nature of information would seem highly desirable and important both for theoretic research and practice.The main topics that have been investigated and are to be reported in this thesis are as follows:1. A new and helpful perspective and some crucial elements for understanding and processing information have been developed or identified. We absorb research results in information philosophy and take how to link various approaches to information as a starting point of our work. We analyze the basic philosophical foundations of these approaches in terms of relationships between information, data, and meaning and approaches to the nature of information, which constitute a two-dimension conceptual framework. This helps us further understand the state of the art of this field and arrive at a fundamental insight, namely the process of information realization is also a process that a knowledge worker takes to obtain meaning from what she/he observes through interpretation. The revelation of the mechanism whereby the impact of information is realized appears to the key to understand the nature of information.2. We have chosen appropriate theoretical foundations for investigating this aforementioned mechanism and discovered the general process of information realization. The process of information realization is a process of interpretation, which results in meaning, and such a process belongs firmly to Hermeneutics. Moreover, such a process is also that of communication between people during which people understand one another and themselves. The process of communication is also that of understanding. Understanding between people embodies relationships between information, data and meaning, and at the same time, the latter enables the former. The existence of Information is independent of its receiver, but at the same time the reason why something is taken as information is because it has the potential to inform the receiver in that it would result in the reduction of some uncertainty that is relevant to her/him. And this can only be realized through certain relationships of information to data and meaning. That is, information is fundamentally associated with people. Based on this view, taking into account the basic characteristics of information systems, we choose hermeneutic thinking as the theoretical foundation for our investigation. As a result, a general process including its elements and stages is identified and a semi-structured model developed.3. We have investigated basic forms of the meaning of information. How to obtain meaning through interpretation is the key to understand and process information. If meaning is created through interpretation, which is what we mean by 'information realization', then how does it happen? What is the nature of inter-subject meaning and subject meaning? We have not found systematic study in the literature on these questions thus far. We observe that meaning is only valuable to the interpreter, whom we call knowledge worker who is skilled in handling information. Interpreters, i.e., people, are of the topic of "Existence and Time" by Heiderger. We draw on Heiderger's work on 'being' to investigate the structure and essential characteristics of information realization with which to understand the essence of inter-subjective meaning and subjective meaning, to analyze links between information and data, and finally to use Galois lattice and formal context to visualize the meaning of information.4. We have further discussed the meaning of information that is based on data, and we have analyzed the relationship between data, information and meaning. We analyze four basic relationships between information and dada based by using formal context, namely, fully matched, the first partly matched, the second partly matched and unmatched, and obtain physical signification and their manifestation in meaning lattices. Dretske observes that an essential component for the notion of 'to know' is information provision. Following Dretske, we analyze information entropy of the four types of meaning. Then using the information entropy obtained, we look at how data convey information content, and how the types of meaning relate to different concepts in knowledge. Finally, we realize that uncertain knowledge is involved in all the above, therefore we further express the four types of meaning (i.e., four types of connections between information and data) by using Rough Set, which deepens our understanding of uncertain knowledge.5. How the information realization process may be modeled formally was investigated. The semantic layer, the reflective layer and the ontological layer of the information realization process are all carried out on the basis of data. Hence relationships between multiple layers of the meaning of information and the information realization process are analyzed in terms of the characteristics of data. We analyze the information realization process by using semiotics, and take the view that the meaning of information be a double interpretative entity and has a systematic structure. How to interpret multiple meaning and multiple layers of meaning of information in an information realization process is transformed into questions that information theory covers, therefore we choose Barwise and Seligma's channel theory to model information realization process formally, and discuss formal representations of the meaning of information, four types of meaning, multiple meaning and multiple layers of meaning from the perspective of distributed systems.6. The semi-structured model based on Hermeneutics and the formal model based on information channel theory about information realization process were combined and then applied to the problem of ontological interoperability and evolution. By using Heidegger's ontologism, we obtain the relationship between ontology and Hermeneutics, analyze the phenomenon of ontological interoperability and evolution in knowledge engineering. We observe that the problem of ontological interoperability and evolution is that of communication, and communication is realized through people's interpretation and attainment of information content from data. Thus the mechanism of information realization based on Hermeneutics is a theoretic foundation for ontological evolution, attainment and realization in knowledge engineering. We use the semi-structured model of information realization process, we apply information channel theory to the analysis of ontological interoperability and evolution, which are based on many-to-one correspondences of information content between human subjects, we obtain a formal framework about communication between human subjects and the modeling steps about an interpretation process of many-to-one correspondences of information content between human subjects. Finally, we describe a case study where the semi-structured model and the formal model of information realization process are applied to knowledge engineering. The main contributions of the thesis:1. By analyzing the philosophical bases of various views of information, we conclude that through understanding relationships between information, data and meaning, we can truly understand the nature of information. Especially, new meanings are created through interpretation activities, behavior or by practice, which are crucial points of this thesis. We demonstrate that the process of information realization is also that of interpretation of the meaning of information.2. By analyzing basic characteristics and assumptions of the process of information realization, we choose Heidegger's Hermeneutics combined with Ricoeur's Hermeneutics as the basis and formulate a semi-structural model of information realization. This represents an extention of current application of the hermeneutical theory to information systems. This also systematically elaborates the digitalization process that underlies the transformation from information to meaning as obversed by Mingers.3. We have achieved a better understanding of the meaning of information, subjective meaning and inter-subjective meaning by drawing on Heiderger's analysis of 'being'. We expand the study of meaning in contemporary studies on the nature of information, which we believe, supplements and improves Floridi's and Mingers' studies on information.4. We analyze the fundamentals of the process of information realization by drawing on principles of semiotics, which serves as a link between the aforementioned semi-structural model of information realization and the information channel theory. As a result, we have arrived at a formal analysis of information realization.5. Based on the mechanism for information realization that we have formulated, we have built a 'many to one' interpretation process for combing information content, which we believe extends current research reported on ontology evolution and interoperability in knowledge engineering.
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