George Miller wrote: The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information (The Psychological Review, 1956, vol. 63, pp. 81-97) advancing the idea of limits in the capacity of short term memory. In general, there seem to be limiting thresholds of the amount of information one can practically receive, decode, and integrate.
Specificity may be one a way to encapsulate information and help overcome this limitation. Telephone numbers can be used to illustrate this point. A telephone number has 10 digit separated into 3 parts, area code, exchange router and 4-digit number. It is easier to remember them in terms of chunks rather than by its individual digits. This example also illustrates a second point, the encapsulation of information.
Observing a surface, there are at least two measures of importance about it: perspective and distance. Perspective is the relative position from where the observation was done and determines what can be seen. Distance determines the detail, or resolution, of what is seen. These two are important when considering ambiguity.
These two measures appear with the same meaning and role in reference to an information package. Perspective is a function of personal inclination and preference adding bias to the interpretation of the package. Distance affects the semantic size (how narrow or how broad is a particular information unit) of the component in the package. The semantic size is the degree of specificity; what can be discerned as a unit of semantic value in the package.
How a unit of information is coded or stored will determine is processing because it points directly to the degree of specificity of that unit.
NOTE: Documents can be seen as units of information. Libraries and search engines treat documents as units of information. Books can be made up of self-contained chapters that are units in their own right.
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