From syntactical to semantical and expedientinformation - a survey

In this contribution the frequently meaningless statementsin the relevant economy literature, about what is knowledge and whatis information, are overcome going back to the roots of information andcommunication theory. Information and entropy are defined preciselyand then the theoretical concept is applied to an AI-model of knowledgeprocessing. The result of this application is a powerful inference mech-anism, permitting conclusions from given facts in a conditional envi-ronment. A creditworthiness problem for consumer credits demonstratesthe performance of information based decision support. Here the exter-nal information factor, namely the clients' profiles, is transformed intoexpedient or useful information. This ability of the decision model givesrise to a deep discussion about the value and price of information....