On cognitive informatics

Information is the third essence in modeling the natural world. This paper attempts to explore an emerging discipline know as cognitive informatics. Cognitive Informatics is a profound interdisciplinary research area that tackles the common root problems of modern informatics, computation, software engineering, artificial intelligence (AI), neural psychology, and cognitive science. Cognitive informatics studies the internal information processing mechanisms and natural intelligence of the brain. This paper describes historical development of informatics from the classical information theory, contemporary informatics, to cognitive informatics. The domain of cognitive informatics and its interdisciplinary nature are explored. Foundations of cognitive informatics, particularly the brain vs. the mind, the acquired life functions vs. the inherited ones, and generic relationships between information, matter and energy are investigated. The potential engineering applications of cognitive informatics and perspectives on future research are discussed. It is expected that the investigation into cognitive informatics will result in fundamental findings towards the development of next generation IT and software technologies, such as neural computers, bioinformatics, quantum information processing, new software development approaches, and new architectures of information systems.