An introduction of cognition information: From form aspect to semantic aspect

The classic information theory (IT) mainly focuses on the form aspect of communication regardless of the semantic aspect, and is lack of cognition ability due to the limited several mathematical instruments. Motivated by the stringent requirements of information predigestion and machine cognition in cognitive wireless networks (CWNs), this paper makes contributions to extend classic IT from traditional form aspect to the semantic aspect and gives an introduction of cognition information (CI), which is defined as the semantic mutual information obtained in the semantic cognition process (SCP). To begin with, we interpret three key viewpoints on semantic that serve as preliminaries for this paper, namely, semantic duality, semantic conditional uniformity and semantic dependency. Then we establish a comprehensive theoretical framework of SCP in terms of natural connotation, three-layer framework and informational model of SCP, along with which a few properties of CI are explained. Furthermore, the research challenges ahead are presented in this paper as well.