Information: One Label, Several Bottles

This is to be a simpleminded talk, perhaps in more ways than I intended. The sense which I did intend is that of simplifying, that is, to try to uncover the barest essentials without which we cannot carry on whatever it is or they are that information scientists and technologists do carry on with. Such things, assuming that they do exist, are necessary but not sufficient. In no social situations, which include medical ones, can one ever formulate the situation explicitly and at the same time exhaust all possibilities. In our profession we must face the fact that we are going to be lucky if we can deal with things that really are necessary, because there always will be things we have not thought of or could not have thought of. The problem is that of Tristram Shandy who took one year to write the first day of his life. The problem is whether he could ever finish his autobiography.