informationfounding

Informationfounding is a field or practice concerned with establishing and sustaining the foundational information assets that underlie knowledge systems. It encompasses methods for discovering, validating, and documenting core data, facts, vocabularies, and contextual information that support reliable reasoning, decision making, and durable communication. The term is used variably but generally overlaps information science, archival science, library science, and data governance.

Core activities include provenance capture, source appraisal, and contextualization; the creation of information foundations such as baseline datasets, controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, and ontologies; and archivalization to preserve digital records. Practitioners emphasize transparency, reproducibility, and traceability, maintaining audit trails that enable users to assess reliability and origin of information.

Applications appear across digital libraries, knowledge bases, and public information systems. In journalism, informationfounding informs source verification and fact-finding practices; in science, it aligns with baseline data curation and replicable research infrastructures; in governance, it supports open data and authoritative reference datasets. The field also engages with metadata standards, authority files, and epistemic ethics.

Challenges include defining the scope of 'foundational' information, resource demands for thorough provenance and curation, rapid changes in data ecosystems, and tensions between openness and privacy. Critics argue that the term may blur distinctions among information governance, data management, and archive practice. Proponents see informationfounding as a unifying concept to promote trust, interoperability, and long-term accessibility.