Preparing for the third millennium: the views of life informatics.
The chief aspects of this paper are the condition of the birth of life informatics and its tasks, basic concepts, principles, and structure. There are three phases of combining informatics with medicine: product, technological, and theoretic application of which the goals are respectively the informatization of numerical and word processing, data of medical treatment, and the knowledge of medicine. While reached the third phase we have dealt with two types of biological information, physical and nonphysical, i.e., body information (i.e., the information about body's components and structure), and life information (i.e., the information about life codes and life programs). Life informatics is a main branch of bioinformatics. It is a new member of the medical informatics family, and as such is younger than health informatics, nursing informatics, and dental informatics. It's task is to assist biologists and medical doctors to recognize and interfere the human life information procedure just as they are doing well with human body's matter and energy system. Its basic concepts are life information, life information medicine, and life information therapy. Its most important principles are information materialism, general informatics, and information determinism. Its main branches are biomolecule, cellular, organic, individual, and social informatics. In the third millennium, the life informatics will be a leading discipline in biology, medicine and informatics, which will gradually influence modern philosophy and other humanities.
Li
Z R
ZR
Institute of Medical Informatics, Hubei Medical University, China. rong@public.wh.hb.cn
Tian
A J
AJ
Yang
Y Y
YY
D001695:Biology; D019295:Computational Biology; D006801:Humans; D019369:Life; D008490:Medical Informatics