  "Information Processing" is a recently launched buzzword whose meaning is
vague and obscure even for the majority of its users. The reason for this is
the lack of a suitable definition for the term "information". In my attempt to
amend this bizarre situation, I have realized that, following the insights of
Kolmogorov's Complexity theory, information can be defined as a description of
structures observable in a given data set. Two types of structures could be
easily distinguished in every data set - in this regard, two types of
information (information descriptions) should be designated: physical
information and semantic information. Kolmogorov's theory also posits that the
information descriptions should be provided as a linguistic text structure.
This inevitably leads us to an assertion that information processing has to be
seen as a kind of text processing. The idea is not new - inspired by the
observation that human information processing is deeply rooted in natural
language handling customs, Lotfi Zadeh and his followers have introduced the
so-called "Computing With Words" paradigm. Despite of promotional efforts, the
idea is not taking off yet. The reason - a lack of a coherent understanding of
what should be called "information", and, as a result, misleading research
roadmaps and objectives. I hope my humble attempt to clarify these issues would
be helpful in avoiding common traps and pitfalls.
