The Structure of Information

Abstract

A formal model of the structure of information is presented in five axioms which define identity, containment, and joins of infons. Joins are shown to be commutative, associative, provide inverses of infons, and, potentially, have many identity elements, two of which are multiplicative and additive. Those two types of join are distributive. The other identity elements are for operators on entwined states. Multiplicative joins correspond to adding or removing new bits to a system while additive joins correspond to a change of state. The order or size of an infon is defined. This groundwork is intended to be used to model continuous and discreet information structures through time, especially in closed systems.