The Research Assessment Exercise of the UK Funding Councils includes a new Computer Science and Informatics unit of assessment UoA whose scope is described as follows
The UoA includes the study of methods for acquiring storing processing communicating and reasoning about information and the role of interactivity in natural and artificial systemsthrough the implementation organisation and use of computer hardware software and other resources. The subjects are characterised by the rigorous application of analysis experimentation and design.
At the Indiana University School of Informatics informatics is defined as the art science and human dimensions of information technology and the study application and social consequences of technology. It is also defined in Informatics I Introduction to Informatics as the application of information technology to the arts sciences and professions. These definitions are widely accepted in the United States and differ from British usage in omitting the study of natural computation.
At the University of California Irvine Department of Informatics informatics is defined as the interdisciplinary study of the design application use and impact of information technology. The discipline of informatics is based on the recognition that the design of this technology is not solely a technical matter but must focus on the relationship between the technology and its use in realworld settings. That is informatics designs solutions in context and takes into account the social cultural and organizational settings in which computing and information technology will be used.
In the Englishspeaking world the term informatics was first widely used in the compound ‘medical informatics’ taken to include the cognitive information processing and communication tasks of medical practice education and research including information science and the technology to support these tasks. Many such compounds are now in use they can be viewed as different areas of applied informatics.
A practitioner of informatics may be called an informatician.
Trademark
Informatics was registered as a trademark in the United States by Informatics Inc. which traded from to This fact prevented the Association for Computing Machinery from becoming the Society for Informatics. As of October a search of the United States Patent and Trademark database reveals no live trademarks on the word informatics alone although many combinations including that word do appear.
