A stochastic model of information value

摘要

Faced with a potentially vast amount of information, how is one to decide what is worth searching and when a piece of information is valuable? With small quantities of information semantic concepts are useful—the relevance and significance of a piece of information can be assessed easily. But with large quantities non-semantic clues are needed, and ones which require less rich (and therefore easier to scan) information. The approach of this paper is to deduce quantitative (rate, flow) and qualitative (value) attributes of information form topological measures of organizational information channels.