The quality of information
Authenticity is an attribute of both the source of information and of the signal channel, including their signal-processing system. The source of the information can be regarded as conscious - in which case the data is an expression of the source's intellectual representations coded in a symbolic language - or unconscious, that is without any coding procedures. The authenticity of an uncoded message can be considered 100%. A conscious information source has to fulfill two conditions to be considered authentic. The first condition is the correspondence of the source's intellectual representations to the real relations. The second condition is the ability of the source to communicate these representations in a manner that a receptor, bearing an appropiate knowledge, can realize the original intellectual representation issued by the source.
The signal channel can be considered authentic, if the consecutive and occasionally multiple coding and decoding processes are not changing the meaning of the message.
The receptor's objectives and its scale of values are determining the importance of an information. Accordingly, the importance of the information can be grouped by the specialization (basic, natural, social or applied sciences, culture) of the content, by the number of the virtual users (biosphere, species, society, family or individual) and by the purposes of use (survival, education, professional, commercial, entertainment).
The intellectual structure of the receptor determines the comprehensibility of an authentic message. Although this structure is multidimensional, it can be represented with a column-diagram, where the columns are representing the knowledge of a specialty or about a group of related objects. On the image below, which could represent a sector of an internist's medical knowledge, the height of a column is corresponding to the deepness of knowledge and the width of the column is corresponding to the breadth of knowledge. The color-scale from violet to red is corresponding to the measure of understanding the relations between the elements belonging to that group: a red coloured (wavelenght 700 nm) column is meaning that there are misunderstandings, while a violet column (400 nm) means that there is a perfect correspondence between the reality and its mental representations.
Hopefully my good old biochemistry professor will not reed this article.
Figure nr. 1
For this subject, a message containing information belonging to the specialities mentioned above will be comprehensible, if the described relations interferes with segments of his knowledge in that domain. For instance, the information contained in the article "Krebs cycle" by Magnus Manske in the Nupedia could be represented as
Figure nr. 2
According to this representation, the article describes the essential knowledge about the metabolites participating in the Krebs cycle, but is not mentioning about 25 % of elementary information (the lower red layer) and about 45% of high-complexity information (the upper violet layer) about this topic. The relations between the elements are well described, so the layer corresponding to the article is blue. This article is comprehensible for the subject whose intellectual architecture was above presented, as his biochemistry knowledge was estimated to 4.9:
Figure nr. 3
By embedding the article, the upper level of biochemistry knowledge raise about 0.1 points, and some areas of the representation of this knowledge turns to green.