Documents, information and meaning

It is possible to envision documents as information that has been packaged. A document is an instance of various components interacting with each other, and that together have a certain meaning. Meaning is, therefore, an inherent property of information as well as of the document.

Meaning emerges from the interpretation of phenomena, including documents as human creations. There are multiple versions of arguments that deal with the nature of meaning, of documents and of information, and of how they relate to each other. However, one would be hard pressed to argue that meaning, documents and information are not related.

A document, thus defined, captures an instantiation of information that is understood as a unit. However, it is clear that it is also a bundle of parts, which are in itself units of information on their own right. Therefore, a document is a network of multiple parts packaged as one unit.

This idea becomes clear when we see a multi-letter word, or a multi-word sentence, etc. Each letter, each word, is a unit of information in its own right but yet form a whole with its own meaning. A similar example is an image made out of strokes, or of pixels, or of visual elements in a coherent collage. The final meaning is related to the relationship of the component elements to each other, as well as of how each part is related to the whole.