Informatics

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Informatics or information science is the study of information. It is often, though not exclusively, studied as a branch of computer science and information technology and is related to database, ontology and software engineering.

Informatics is primarily concerned with the structure, creation, management, storage, retrieval, dissemination and transfer of information. Informatics also includes studying the application of information in organizations, on its usage and the interaction between people, organizations and information systems. Within information science attention has been given in recent years to human computer interaction (HCI) and to the ways people generate, use and find information.

Two definitions of Informatics taught in an introductory class at Indiana University Bloomington are "The Art, Science and Human Dimensions of IT" and "The study, application, and social consequences of technology." An alternative definition of Informatics, given at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh as "The study of the structure, behaviour, and interactions of natural and engineered computational systems.", is more widely used in the United Kingdom. It studies the representation, processing, and communication of information in a system, including all computational, cognitive and social aspects. The central notion is the transformation of information - whether by computation or communication, whether by organisms or artifacts. In this sense, it is more or less a merger of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computing science, and related fields.

Informatics focuses on understanding problems and then applying information (and other) technology as needed. In other words, it tackles the problem first rather than technology first.

A note on international terminology
The words informatique (French), Informatik (German), informatika (Hungarian), informatica (Italian, Dutch), informatyka (Polish) and informática (Spanish, Portuguese), among others, do not mean the same as the English informatics. Rather, they refer to computer science in its broadest acceptation, and to any discipline which is focused on computers. It includes computer engineering, software engineering, and information technology.