It is 60 years since essential attributes of information were explored in the field of philosophy, resulting in contention of a hundred schools of thought and wide division of opinions so far. Some scholars at home and abroad have been trying to build a new system of information philosophy from the angle of ontology so as to explain the world. This paper, however, puts forward a definition of information and its mathematical expressions, and points out that information is the collection of three kinds of attributes of things, which is proved perfect after testing. It is found on analysis that the essence of information people refer to nowadays is just the interaction of matters, and the representation of the law of causality in philosophy. The paper also suggests that information is only a noun that people have customarily used and confused. Eventually, the induction, differentiation and utilization of conventionally-stated information should be applied into studying matters themselves.

In the paper considering the influence of node's inertia and a constant external field, we establish an public opinion evolution model in which public opinion evolution and network topological structure interact with each othe. It is found that degree distribution gradually gets away from typical power law distribution to Poisson distribution with time evolution under the infuence of node's inertia and a constant external field. With the time evolution in system, there is obvious convergence effect of the public opinions distribution, which not only relates with node's inertia but also depends on the constant external field. It can be obtained that adjusting the value of node's inertia factor and constant external field can control the opinion value's number, which even controls the rate of change.

In order to establish and improve theoretical informatics, this paper discusses the goal and special methods of the researches on theoretical informatics. These methods include driving intellectual innovation with method innovation; unifying tool informatics and field informatics; combining multi subjects in realism breadth wise and history lengthways; combining multi levels in application, theory and philosophy; and listing some programs that are pending further discussion.

In this paper, the authors introduce separately the "Reduction" methodology, which is mainly applied in the traditional Material Science, and the "Emergence" methodology, which is mainly applied in the Information Science. With analyzing the application scope of "Reductionism" and its restriction, we discuss how "Emergencism" is apt to improving the development of information science, and suggest a conversion from reductionism based on paradigm of material science into emergencism based on paradigm of information science.

With the application of computer technology and network technology, domain informatics have generated. Almost every combination of a basic subject and informatics can generate a new field of domain informatics by cross-study. However, the development of each discipline is in a different situation and a special degree. In this paper, the authors introduce chemical informatics, bioinformatics, medical informatics, and linguistics: their definitions, researches, and development trends.

The life information evolution is a theory which runs parallel with the Darwin's theory of biological material evolution, including chemical evolution, biological evolution, and information evolution in the human evolution. The Darwinism is the theory basically about the living matter evolution. We believe that the life essence is not only the material, but also the information. The theory of life information evolution is a promoted version of the theory of biology evolution in the information age. The goal of this paper is to suggest that the theory of biological evolution should be related to the entire universal life information evolution mechanism, which is helpful for us to reveal the rule of life information evolution.

This paper conducts the researches on the three laws of informatics proposed by Zong-Rong LI using the method of analogy with thermodynamics. The three laws of theoretical informatics are: the information being nonconservation; information energy increasing with time; information increasing with no upper limit. These three laws are keys of the information ontology research. They show up the character and relationship of information, entropy, negentropy, and information energy.

At present, information technology is developing very rapidly. Numerous traditional disciplines have to be informationized and domain informatics derived from it. It calls for the emergence of theoretical informatics because of the need of domain informatics, National Informatization and the transformation of industrial society to an information society. However, present information theory has limitation, for example, the Shannon communication theory only applies to communications. In this paper, we use the system engineering theory. Firstly we study the background of the theoretical informatics. Secondly we analyze the status of it and the limitation of present information theory. And then we discuss the hotspots of the theoretical informatics both at home and abroad. At last, we point out that the development of it should break out the shackles of theoretical paradigms.

The paper considers necessary conditions for establishing information science as a scientific autonomous discipline. The lack of commonly accepted definition of information is not as threatening as it may seem, as each study within the discipline may choose own definition, as well as own philosophical framework, when there are some alternatives to choose between. More important is development of common methodology of inquiry and some range of standard questions regarding the concept of information. Also, it is important to develop some standards of inquiry which would make information scientific studies accessible to philosophical analysis and reflection. In turn, contributions of information science to resolution of problems identified within philosophy will give a best measure of the maturity of information science as a discipline.

The notion of Information is one of the most essential that guides situations to flow in certain ways. Situations such as those of natural disasters, "the Haiti earthquake 2010"; the financial crisis, that of "Greece Crisis 2010"; or the environmental disasters, such as that of "oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico 2010", are just a few instances of constant growing empirical dilemmas in our global society, where information plays a central role. The meaning of what information is has clear implications on how we deal with it in our practical lives, which in turn may give rise to situations that we would prefer to be without. This way, the notion of information has evidently presented the need to question what it really means and how does it dominate the functioning of our global society. Thus, two questions emerge in this paper: what definitions of the notion of information are presented in the literature?; and, what are the differences between these definitions? To answer these questions, we have conducted a comprehensive literature survey of more than two hundred gathered publications. Detailed analyses of the content of these publications identified four forms of information notion definitions. The results show that these four forms present diverse and opposing views of the notion of information, labelled as the "quartet approach". These addressed different foci, contexts and challenges. In addition, we present an alternative, yet a novel understanding of the notion of information, associated with how information functions in our societies. This understanding is presented with a new perspective, intended to address significant needs of the information society.