Ex Formation

ExFormation is the properties of interpretation or development of information.

The simplest possible example: All bits have positions. If it weren't for their positions, there'd be no distinction between one bit and another. Bit positions can represent any semantic you like. But position obviously isn't some information attribute of a bit; it's part of the ExFormation of a bit.

Broader examples: a genome is the information necessary to construct a organism; a proteome is the exformation necessary to develop that organism. A tablature is the information necessary to play music; a culture is the exformation necessary interpret that music. A class is the information necessary to construct an object; a system is the exformation necessary to deploy that object.

Many people ignore exformation, but without it information is just random numbers. Perhaps we swim in a sea of information generated by vast extraterrestrial civilizations; we just lack the exformation we need to take advantage of it.

Exformation is not, itself, information. You may represent it in bits, but then you just need more exformation to implement them.

Congratulations, you've just reinvented "information" but given it a synonym that looks like an antonym. Your description here is precisely true of "information" in terms of Shannon's InformationTheory.

I have only the greatest respect for Shannon, though I haven't read him well. It's my understanding that his definition of information content isn't concerned with interpretation, but with the properties of a signal channel necessary to convey information faithfully. I'd be very interested in how you understand the relation of this to the terms above.

You may be trying to drive at something different: The semantic meaning of information is explicitly not part of information theory. A certain chunk of information like ABQAGDYWJ during WWII might have been interpreted to have the meaning "attack Berlin at dawn", and the latter is not "information", it is "interpretation". There's no need to coin new words, if that's what you mean, though. We already have perfectly good ones that the reading audience already understands, such as "interpretation", "meaning", "semantics", "context", etc, and the deeper aspects of this subject lies within the realm of study of "cognitive science", a young and unfinished discipline. (Less technical aspects of it, with different goals, lie in a more mature discipline called "literary analysis", with or without postmodernism.) -- DougMerritt

Let's not get so high-falutin' - such waffly subjects aren't going to produce anything but words. Consider a binary polynomial. The parameterization of terms of the polynomial is information. The coefficients of the polynomial are information. The embodiment of the polynomial - the generation of information and then signal caused by its expression as a process - is ExFormation. This is a much simpler construction than most of what passes for semantics.

ExFormation was coined by TorNorretranders (that second o should have a sort of slash through it) who defined it in TheUserIllusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size, TorNorretranders ISBN 0140230122 as

Exformation: Information which has been abstracted away, and now is implicitly included in the message.

Interesting. --TimVoght

http://www.clever.net/quinion/words/turnsofphrase/tp-exf1.htm

There's another meaning at http://www.herjedalen.se/softdesign/en/exform.html and another again at http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Words/e.html . And I'll bet another again at http://www.exformation.com , though my browser lacks the ExFormation to render it.