Our Mission and Vision
Connecting the Disciplines
The term informatics embraces the modern concept of information in all its aspects: information management, infrastructure, processing, presentation, dissemination, design, and analysis. It is deeply integrative in approach. In practice, it ranges from the development of information technologies in the service of specific fields, to broader scholarly investigations of the representation, processing and communication of information in its full social context.
Informatics is the application of theories and technologies of information to other fields. It deals with the art, science and engineering of information and communication in its broadest social context, and in its most focused technical details.
Many fields make contributions to informatics: communication and media, computer science and information technology, and management information systems, to name a few.
Informatics contributes to many fields: biology (bioinformatics and neuroinformatics), health care (health informatics), and law (legal informatics), to name a few.
The foremost goal of the informatics-related programs at NKU is to graduate students who are savvy about information technology, who are accomplished communicators, and who are intellectually agile "renaissance people" for the information age.
Information is the thread linking a variety of disciplines and endeavors. This link is not merely information technology; other concepts unite the informatics fields as well. For example, the notion of trust spans issues in cryptology, network security, e-commerce, privacy (technical, ethical, and legal issues), and journalism (trustworthiness of print, broadcasts, images, websites and blogs).
Organizing fields of study at a university around Informatics is a new idea. It cuts "diagonally" across traditional groupings such as Business, Engineering, Arts, Humanities and Science. NKU is on the leading edge of this development, but it is not unique.
