Informatics is the study of computational systems, especially those for data storage and

retrieval Retrieval could refer to: Computer science * RETRIEVE, Tymshare database that inspired dBASE and others * Data retrieval * Document retrieval * Image retrieval * Information retrieval * Knowledge retrieval * Medical retrieval * Music informati ...

. According to ACM ''Europe and'' '' Informatics Europe'', informatics is synonymous with

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includin ...

and

computing Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Computing has scientific, ...

as a profession, in which the central notion is transformation of information. In other countries, the term "informatics" is used with a different meaning in the context of

library science Library science (often termed library studies, bibliothecography, and library economy) is an interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary field that applies the practices, perspectives, and tools of management, information technology, education, and ...

Different meanings

In some countries, depending on local interpretations, the term "informatics" is used synonymously to mean

information system An information system (IS) is a formal, sociotechnical, organizational system designed to collect, process, store, and distribute information. From a sociotechnical perspective, information systems are composed by four components: task, people ...

information science Information science (also known as information studies) is an academic field which is primarily concerned with analysis, collection, classification, manipulation, storage, retrieval, movement, dissemination, and protection of information. ...

information theory Information theory is the scientific study of the quantification, storage, and communication of information. The field was originally established by the works of Harry Nyquist and Ralph Hartley, in the 1920s, and Claude Shannon in the 1940s. ...

, information engineering,

information technology Information technology (IT) is the use of computers to create, process, store, retrieve, and exchange all kinds of data . and information. IT forms part of information and communications technology (ICT). An information technology system ...

information processing Information processing is the change (processing) of information in any manner detectable by an observer. As such, it is a process that ''describes'' everything that happens (changes) in the universe, from the falling of a rock (a change in posi ...

, or other theoretical or practical fields. In Germany, the term ''informatics'' almost exactly corresponds to modern computer science. Accordingly, universities in continental Europe usually translate "informatics" as

, or sometimes information and computer science, although technical universities may translate it as computer science & engineering. In the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., federal district, five ma ...

, however, the term ''informatics'' is mostly used in context of data science,

or its applications in healthcare (

health informatics Health informatics is the field of science and engineering that aims at developing methods and technologies for the acquisition, processing, and study of patient data, which can come from different sources and modalities, such as electronic ...

), where it first appeared in the US. The

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seat ...

uses this term to refer to

social computing Social computing is an area of computer science that is concerned with the intersection of social behavior and computational systems. It is based on creating or recreating social conventions and social contexts through the use of software and tech ...

. In some countries, this term is associated with

natural computation Natural computing,G.Rozenberg, T.Back, J.Kok, Editors, Handbook of Natural Computing, Springer Verlag, 2012A.Brabazon, M.O'Neill, S.McGarraghyNatural Computing Algorithms Springer Verlag, 2015 also called natural computation, is a terminology intro ...

and neural computation. The

Government of Canada The government of Canada (french: gouvernement du Canada) is the body responsible for the federal administration of Canada. A constitutional monarchy, the Crown is the corporation sole, assuming distinct roles: the executive, as the ''Crown-i ...

uses the term to refer to operational units offering network and computer services to the various departments.

Etymology

In 1956, the German informatician Karl Steinbuch and engineer Helmut Gröttrup coined the word ''Informatik'' when they developed the ''Informatik-Anlage'' for the Quelle mail-order management, one of the earliest commercial applications of data processing. In April 1957, Steinbuch published a paper called ''Informatik: Automatische Informationsverarbeitung'' ("Informatics: Automatic Information Processing"). The morphology—''informat''-ion + -''ics''—uses "the accepted form for names of sciences, as conics, mathematics, linguistics, optics, or matters of practice, as economics, politics, tactics", and so, linguistically, the meaning extends easily to encompass both the science of information and the practice of information processing. The German word ''Informatik'' is usually translated to English as ''computer science'' by universities or ''computer science & engineering'' by technical universities (German equivalents for institutes of technology). Depending on the context, informatics is also translated into ''computing'', ''scientific computing'' or ''information and computer technology''. The

French French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...

term ''informatique'' was coined in 1962 by Philippe Dreyfus. In the same month was also proposed independently by Walter F. Bauer (1924–2015) and associates who co-founded software company '' Informatics Inc.'' The term for the new discipline quickly spread throughout Europe, but it did not catch on in the United States. Over the years, many different definitions of informatics have been developed, most of them claim that the essence of informatics is one of these concepts: information processing, algorithms, computation, information, algorithmic processes, computational processes or computational systems. The earliest uses of the term ''informatics'' in the

was during the 1950s with the beginning of computer use in healthcare. Early practitioners interested in the field soon learned that there were no formal education programs, and none emerged until the late 1960s. They introduced the term informatics only in the context of archival science, which is only a small part of informatics. Professional development, therefore, played a significant role in the development of health informatics. According to Imhoff et al., 2001, healthcare informatics is not only the application of computer technology to problems in healthcare, but covers all aspects of generation, handling, communication, storage, retrieval, management, analysis, discovery, and synthesis of data information and knowledge in the entire scope of healthcare. Furthermore, they stated that the primary goal of health informatics can be distinguished as follows: ''To provide solutions for problems related to data, information, and knowledge processing. To study general principles of processing data information and knowledge in medicine and healthcare''. The term

quickly spread throughout the United States in various forms such as

nursing informatics Health informatics is the field of science and engineering that aims at developing methods and technologies for the acquisition, processing, and study of patient data, which can come from different sources and modalities, such as electronic ...

, public health informatics or medical informatics. Analogous terms were later introduced for use of computers in various fields, such as business informatics, forest informatics, legal informatics etc. These fields still mainly use term informatics in context of library science.

Informatics as library science

In the fields of geoinformatics or

irrigation informatics Irrigation informatics is a newly emerging academic field that is a cross-disciplinary science using informatics to study the information flows and data management related to irrigation. The field is one of many new informatics sub-specialities that ...

, the term -informatics usually mean

, in context related to

. This was the first meaning of informatics introduced in

Russia Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering , and encompassing one-eigh ...

in 1966 by A.I. Mikhailov, R.S. Gilyarevskii, and A.I. Chernyi, which referred to a scientific discipline that studies the structure and properties of scientific information. In this context, the term was also used by the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility. Some scientists use this term, however, to refer to the science of information processing, not data management. In the English-speaking world, the term ''informatics'' was first widely used in the compound medical informatics, taken to include "the cognitive, information processing, and communication tasks of medical practice, education, and research, including information science and the technology to support these tasks". Many such compounds are now in use; they can be viewed as different areas of "''applied informatics''".

Informatics as information processing science

In the early 1990s, K.K. Kolin proposed an interpretation of informatics as a fundamental science that studies information processes in nature, society, and technical systems. A broad interpretation of ''informatics'', as "the study of the structure, algorithms, behaviour, and interactions of natural and artificial computational systems," was introduced by the

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh ( sco, University o Edinburgh, gd, Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in post-nominals) is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Granted a royal charter by King James VI in 15 ...

in 1994. This has led to the merger of the institutes of computer science, artificial intelligence and cognitive science into a single School of Informatics in 2002. More than a dozen nearby universities joined

Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance The Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) is a "research pool" funded by the Scottish Funding Council. A research pool is a collaboration of Scottish university departments whose broad objective is to create a coherent resear ...

. Some non-European universities have also adopted this definition (e.g.

Kyoto University School of Informatics The Graduate School of Informatics at Kyoto University was founded in 1998, incorporating four former departments of the Graduate School of Engineering: Electronic and Communication, Applied Mathematics and Physics, Information Science, and Applie ...

). In 2003, Yingxu Wang popularized term cognitive informatics, described as follows: Informatics as a fundamental science of information in natural and artificial systems was proposed again in Russia in 2006. In 2007, the influential book '' Decoding the Universe'' was published. Former president of

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

, Peter Denning wrote in 2007: The 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, of the UK Funding Councils, includes a new, ''Computer Science and Informatics,'' unit of assessment (UoA), whose scope is described as follows: :''The UoA includes the study of methods for acquiring, storing, processing, communicating and reasoning about information, and the role of interactivity in natural and artificial systems, through the implementation, organisation and use of computer hardware, software and other resources. The subjects are characterised by the rigorous application of analysis, experimentation and design. In 2008, the construction of the Informatics Forum was completed. In 2018, the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing was established. Its construction is planned to be completed in 2021.

Controversial fields

* evolutionary informatics - a new field that comes from the concept of an

intelligent design Intelligent design (ID) is a pseudoscience, pseudoscientific argument for the existence of God, presented by its proponents as "an evidence-based scientific theory about life's origins".#Numbers 2006, Numbers 2006, p. 373; " Dcaptured he ...

. According to ''Evolutionary Informatics Lab'', evolutionary informatics studies how evolving systems incorporate, transform, and export information. In 2017, the influential book "''Introduction To Evolutionary Informatics"'' was published''.''

Informatics as computer science

Journals and conferences

* '' Information and Computation'' * '' Acta Informatica'' * '' Information Processing Letters'' * ''

Neural Information Processing Systems The Conference and Workshop on Neural Information Processing Systems (abbreviated as NeurIPS and formerly NIPS) is a machine learning and computational neuroscience conference held every December. The conference is currently a double-track mee ...

'' * '' Journal of Automata, Languages and Combinatorics'' * ''International Journal of Cognitive Informatics and Natural Intelligence'' * '' Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition'') * '' Symposium on Theory of Computing'' * ''

European Conference on Computer Vision The European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) is a biennial research conference with the proceedings published by Springer Science+Business Media. Similar to ICCV in scope and quality, it is held those years which ICCV is not. It is considere ...

'' * ''Brain Informatics'' * '' International Conference on Computer Vision'' * '' International Conference on Machine Learning'' * '' Algorithmica'' * '' Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science')'' * '' European Symposium on Algorithms'' * '' Fundamenta Informaticae'' * '' Symposium on Discrete Algorithms'' * '' Journal of Logic and Computation'' * ''Bioinformatics'' * ''Neural Computing and Applications'' * Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems * '' International Symposium on Fundamentals of Computation Theory'' * '' International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming'' * ''Journal of Scientific Computing'' * ''Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science'' * ''Annual Symposium on Computational Geometry'' * '' Simulation & Gaming'' * ''

Journal of Machine Learning Research The ''Journal of Machine Learning Research'' is a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal covering machine learning. It was established in 2000 and the first editor-in-chief was Leslie Kaelbling Leslie Pack Kaelbling is an American robotic ...

'' * '' Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research'' * '' ACM Transactions on Graphics'' * '' IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics'' * '' IEEE Transactions on Computers'' * ''IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture'' * ''ACM Symposium on Computer and Communications Security'' * '' Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures'' * '' Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science''

Community

Related organisations

* Informatics Europe *

IEEE Computer Society The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operati ...

* Computing Research Association * Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence * American Society for Information Science and Technology *

International Federation for Information Processing The International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) is a global organisation for researchers and professionals working in the field of computing to conduct research, develop standards and promote information sharing. Established in 196 ...

* Association for Logic, Language and Information * Gesellschaft für Informatik * Association for Women in Computing * Computer Science Teachers Association * Computability in Europe * European Association for Theoretical Computer Science * Raspberry Pi Foundation

Academic schools and departments

* Information School at

* College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity at University at Albany, SUNY * Department of Informatics at

University of California, Irvine The University of California, Irvine (UCI or UC Irvine) is a public land-grant research university in Irvine, California. One of the ten campuses of the University of California system, UCI offers 87 undergraduate degrees and 129 graduate and p ...

* College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at

University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...

* School of Information at The University of Texas at Austin * Manning College of Information & Computer Sciences at

University of Massachusetts Amherst The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst, UMass) is a public research university in Amherst, Massachusetts and the sole public land-grant university in Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Founded in 1863 as an agricultural college, it ...

* Texas Women's University * College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at

* Department of Informatics at

Indiana University Bloomington Indiana University Bloomington (IU Bloomington, Indiana University, IU, or simply Indiana) is a public research university in Bloomington, Indiana. It is the flagship campus of Indiana University and, with over 40,000 students, its largest camp ...

* School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis * School of Information at San Jose State University * School of Computing and Informatics at University of Louisiana at Lafayette * Department of Computer Science at The University of Iowa * Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at

Arizona State University Arizona State University (Arizona State or ASU) is a public research university in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Founded in 1885 by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, ASU is one of the largest public universities by enrollment in t ...

* School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems at Northern Arizona University * School of Engineering and Computer Science at

Baylor University Baylor University is a private Baptist Christian research university in Waco, Texas. Baylor was chartered in 1845 by the last Congress of the Republic of Texas. Baylor is the oldest continuously operating university in Texas and one of the ...

* College of Information Sciences and Technology at

Pennsylvania State University The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State or PSU) is a public state-related land-grant research university with campuses and facilities throughout Pennsylvania. Founded in 1855 as the Farmers' High School of Pennsylvania, Penn State becam ...

* College of Engineering and Computing at University of South Carolina * Doctoral School of Informatics at University of Debrecen * School of Information Sciences at

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univers ...

University of Sussex , mottoeng = Be Still and Know , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £14.4 million (2020) , budget = £319.6 million (2019–20) , chancellor = Sanjeev Bhaskar , vice_chancellor = Sasha Roseneil , ...

* Institute for Data Science & Informatics at

University of Missouri The University of Missouri (Mizzou, MU, or Missouri) is a public land-grant research university in Columbia, Missouri. It is Missouri's largest university and the flagship of the four-campus University of Missouri System. MU was founded ...

* Norwegian University of Science and Technology * Department of Informatics at

University of Bergen The University of Bergen ( no, Universitetet i Bergen, ) is a research-intensive state university located in Bergen, Norway. As of 2019, the university has over 4,000 employees and 18,000 students. It was established by an act of parliament in 194 ...

* School of Informatics at

* Department of Informatics at

Technical University of Munich The Technical University of Munich (TUM or TU Munich; german: Technische Universität München) is a public research university in Munich, Germany. It specializes in engineering, technology, medicine, and applied and natural sciences. Establis ...

* Università della Svizzera italiana * List of Information Schools