Characterization of Information Measures

How should information be measured? That is the question posed by and dealt with in this book. The concept of information has become so pervasive that people regularly refer to the present era as the Information Age. Information takes many forms: oral, written, visual, electronic, mechanical, electromagnetic, etc. Many recent inventions deal with the storage, transmission and retrieval of information. From a mathematical point of view, the most basic problem for the field of information theory is how to measure information. This book asks: "What are the most desirable properties for a measure of information to possess?" These properties are then used to determine explicitly the most "natural" (ie. the most useful and appropriate) forms for measures of information.