információ

Információ is the Hungarian term for information. In everyday usage it denotes content that reduces uncertainty or increases knowledge. It is a central concept across disciplines such as communications, computing, library science, and cognitive science.

Etymology: The word derives from Latin informatio and has cognate forms in many European languages. In Hungarian, the term entered scientific and administrative language during the modernization of vocabulary in the 18th–20th centuries, and today it is used to describe both data with contextual meaning and the acts of informing.

In information theory, information is a quantitative measure of uncertainty reduction, formalized by Claude Shannon. It is measured in bits; rarer events convey more information. Data are raw symbols; information arises when they are interpreted within a model or context. The theory emphasizes transmission, coding, and storage efficiency rather than sentence-level meaning.

Applications and practice: information is central to data storage, transmission, and retrieval; metadata and information governance; and information systems design. Techniques such as encoding, compression (lossless and lossy), error detection and correction, and privacy protection are studied to manage information resources.

Philosophy and semantics: information is related to meaning but is not identical to it; semantics concerns interpretation, while information science studies how information is organized, found, and used. Distinctions between data, information, and knowledge help structure how we understand and apply information in society.