Understanding and managing uncertainty and information

It is becoming vitally important for our society to improve its ability to manage uncertainty. By examining high-level concepts such as knowledge, information, certainty and ignorance, it is possible to construct a conceptual framework that allows such concepts to be compared and understood. It also becomes clear that rigorous scientific approaches that require definable and operational concepts on which to operate are best applied to information, rather than the more general uncertainty. The probability theory, fuzzy set theory, info-gap models, and Shannon information theory are examined to compare their information-management approaches. A new theory on the nature of information, based on complex systems, is proposed that enhances our understanding both of information as a concept and of how the various tools can be applied