flow of information

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The title of this article is ambiguous. Further meanings are listed under Information flow (disambiguation) .

The flow of information (also: flow of information ) is understood to mean the path and course that oral, written or visual data take to get from a source to one or more recipients. The flow of information is a good and workable analogy.

The scientific consideration of the information flow in organizations is called information logistics , in information technology one speaks of data flow .

In the flow of information, it is important that the recipients receive the information on time. Disruptions in the flow of information can lead to wrong decisions or misunderstandings (an example: an employee misses a conference because no one has told him or her).

Organized misdirections are rare, as such a solution would have to be coordinated and implemented.

Non-functioning rivers can lead to a loss of information and have far-reaching consequences.

Technically

An information flow can be measured and quantified by the data throughput .

The flow of information should not be greater than the maximum amount of data given by the bandwidth. Otherwise there will be a bottleneck and the duration of the transmission will be longer.

Information flows often have several stations. Circular rivers are also possible.

The concept of information flow can be used to debug transmitting systems. A malfunction cannot be identified in the period before the error. After that, no or only incorrect transmission takes place. See data throughput 1 GB (before the fault) to 0 bit (after the fault).

Information flows are often preliminary stages of synchronization processes in which data from different sources are merged into one database.

In the area of data protection , the controlled transmission corresponds to a lock between sender and recipient. This can be opened or closed (approval procedure).

In the course of an optimization, only differences in the sense of changes, for example to the last valid state, can be transferred during synchronization. This enables the stream to be compressed to 20%.

Concrete applications

The transmission of a UDP or TCP packet can be modeled with the help of the information flow (computer science). The medium at this point is the cable or the Ethernet. The packet passes many stations between the sender and receiver.

There are also flows of information in the neuronal: from the eye to the visual center, for example. However, many areas are apparently not stream-like, but rather distributive, so that certain concept effects cannot be used. A lesion site can only partially be determined in this way.