Talk:Information engineering

Not a discipline

This seems quite a made up new term to me. While occasionally used, it doesn't appear to have a proper definition. The first source, [1] for example actually says "use of information in engineering systems", and "straddles the boundary between traditional Computer Science and Engineering Departments" - so they do not seem to consider it a discipline, but rather just a department working in two disciplines. Same for the next two sources given. So any real sources for a proper and agreed upon definition? Otherwise, I'd rather redirect to Information Technology Engineering or simply computer science and file this as yet another buzzword...

Now redefining fields such as machine learning that clearly predate this to be "subfields" of information engineering clearly stretches this a bit too far. Ask machine learners, whether they consider about where the discipline belongs to, you'll likely hear 80% "computer science", 20% answer "statistics", 0% answer "information engineering"...

Just because some departments / groups sitting inbetween of CS and EE like to call themselves IE does not really make this a separate super-field that contains all of ML + AI + telco + ... HelpUsStopSpam (talk) 20:15, 3 October 2018 (UTC)

• There was some discussion about this earlier on in the talk page (which has now been moved to Talk: Information Technology Engineering). The issue is that what is now Information Technology Engineering (a software engineering buzzword that was originally listed as information engineering) is completely different to Information Engineering (which usually refers to machine learning, signal processing, control theory etc.). It doesn't make any more sense to merge these two than it does to merge the articles for the United States of America and South America because they both contain the word "America".
• For the comment about information engineering being the "use of information in engineering systems": Yes, that's what information engineering is (and this is essentially what's said in first sentence of the article introduction), I don't see how that makes the source fake or illegitimate in any way. For the comment about the fact that it "straddles the boundary between traditional Computer Science and Engineering Departments": Yes, it does, but there's nothing wrong with that; bioengineering straddles engineering and biology, chemical engineering straddles chemistry and engineering, yet these are both legitimate fields, hence I don't see why information engineering being interdisciplinary makes this source fake or illegitimate. Maybe the word "subfield" carries too strong a sense of exclusivity, but information engineering definitely covers these fields (as evidenced by the large number of universities using the term "information engineering" to refer to this). There's no conflict in having certain topics being listed as part of several different fields, as there's a lot of overlap between other areas of engineering too.
• Also, it's not just a subfield of computer science; there are topics in information engineering such as control theory and signal processing (particularly analogue signal processing) which don't usually fall under computer science (and there are topics such as robotics which are not a strict subset).
• The claim about "Ask machine learners, whether they consider about where the discipline belongs to" is not substantiated in any way. If we're going by anecdotes: then from my experience (working with machine learning academics in the United Kingdom), a fair proportion of academics use the term information engineering. ArguMentor (talk) 14:05, 4 October 2018 (UTC)

The problem is that there is no proper definition of IE. Consider this [2], something completely different.

Or Gartner, a reputable consulting company: https://www.gartner.com/it-glossary/ie-information-engineering

Or this 132 times cited paper: Hackathorn, Richard D., and Jahangir Karimi. “A Framework for Comparing Information Engineering Methods.” MIS Quarterly, vol. 12, no. 2, 1988, pp. 203–220. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/248845.

Or the EU: https://cordis.europa.eu/news/rcn/9286_en.html

By any means - the term "Information Engineering" is everything and nothing. IMHO, this page should be at most a disambiguation page. It is not at all as well defined as you think it is.

The sources that you give, like [3] do **not** give a definition for the term. They only talk about that department, they are not suitable sources. They just show that it is occasionally used in a *very* unspecific way: as part of a department name. HelpUsStopSpam (talk) 18:59, 4 October 2018 (UTC)

Yes, it's true that that particular link doesn't outright state a definition, but it's implied by the fact that they say (paraphrasing) "This is the information engineering department, which involves x,y,z". If you really need a "definition", then how about this Turing Lecture given by an information engineering professor: [4] (particularly pages 2,3), or these lecture slides which explain what the topic is a bit more abstractly: [5] (particularly page 5). I don't see what's wrong with using universities/professors as sources; as per Wikipedia:Notability, they have covered information engineering significantly (made whole web pages about it), they are reliable sources, and they are independent (i.e. they are talking about information engineering rather than being information engineering itself). If universities and professors talking/writing pages/giving presentations about a topic wasn't sufficient then Wikipedia would have to remove almost all of its articles on scientific topics.

The links you've given are for the topic that I moved to Information Technology Engineering in order to avoid a name clash. That topic doesn't have a super clear name, as some people also call it information engineering methodology, or just information engineering (this last name used to exclusively mean information engineering methodology, but has now started being used to mean something else; this explains why several of the links you gave are decades old). Maybe it would be better to have two articles called "information engineering": Information engineering and Information engineering (software engineering) (and redirect Information Technology Engineering to Information engineering (software engineering)), or at least redirect Information engineering (software engineering) to Information Technology Engineering. ArguMentor (talk) 20:22, 4 October 2018 (UTC)

If "Information Technology Engineering" is a common alternative name, there is nothing wrong with using the alternate name for that article. But this article should then also be renamed to something such as Information engineering (electrical engineering), and the page Information engineering should become a typical disambiguation page that lists all common meanings of this term. There is no requirement that it may only link to articles of the "same name (field)" pattern: consider for example the George Bush article.

The turing lecture slides at least contain something resembling a definition. Although it is not clear whether he is defining a field, or his chair. He also does not consider ML etc. to be subfields, but components that are used and improved. And so far, I honestly do not see any difference to, e.g., Computer Science and Engineering. How exactly is this different from your proposed information engineering (except that the name clash isn't as annoying)? To me, your article is just as much an advertisement pitch as the old ITE article was... HelpUsStopSpam (talk) 22:19, 4 October 2018 (UTC)

I don't mind having a disambiguation page (although it seems a little unwieldy given that Information Technology Engineering already has its own unique name, plus there's also the unique name Information Engineering Methodology); I think it would have to be something like Information engineering (engineering discipline) though since information engineering isn't really part of electrical engineering at all. Actually, I did some further reading on on the Wikipedia disambiguation procedures, more specifically Wikipedia:NCDAB. In particular, it mentions the Natural disambiguation option: When there is another term (such as Apartment instead of Flat) or more complete name (such as English language instead of English) that is unambiguous, commonly used in English (even without being the most common term), and equally clear, that term is typically the best to use. Later on in the same section it says Natural disambiguation that is unambiguous, commonly used, and clear is generally preferable to parenthetical disambiguation. It seems that our case falls under this criterion; the current information engineering is known by only one term (see later paragraphs for a full explanation of this), whereas ITE has two other natural disambiguation names: information technology engineering and information engineering methodology. Hence under Wikipedia:NCDAB we should stick to the current naming system, or perhaps switch information technology engineering to information engineering methodology if the latter is slightly more common.

If "subfields" is a huge issue then I'm fine with using "components"/"elements" or whatever instead. I just meant to get across the idea that information engineering covers stuff like machine learning/control theory in the same way that aerospace engineering covers propulsion/fluid dynamics. (I just made an edit to the article that replaces terms like "subdisciplines" with terms like "elements" to bring it more in line with the aerospace engineering article.)

Since you say that you can't see any difference with Computer Science and Engineering, and think that information engineering is part of electrical engineering, I'd like to explain a bit more about how information engineering is completely different:

* Firstly, it's about the algorithms (i.e. the information), not the physical hardware. If we look at the Computer Science and Engineering article for example, they're focused on stuff like "processor design" and "embedded systems" (it's the same for Computer engineering), and similarly with Electrical engineering they're looking at electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism, i.e. they're more concerned with how the computer is actually running it's calculations in the physical world, and even when they're looking at something like control theory they're looking at stuff like electronic circuits, digital signal processors, microcontrollers, and programmable logic controllers. For the most part information engineering is not concerned with this, all it cares about is that there's a magical device (could be a computer, could be a group of people in a room doing calculations by hand) which can run our algorithms (e.g. fast Fourier transform for signal processing, or Routh-Hurwitz for control theory) quickly. If electricity were never discovered and people were instead using fast mechanical steam powered computers, information engineers would be fine and happy, whereas electrical engineers would not (and would not even exist).

* Secondly, there's just not that much overlap between information engineering and the topics in the computer science side of Computer Science and Engineering. For example, the latter lists operating systems (not part of information engineering), theory of computation (not part of information engineering), design and analysis of algorithms (not part of information engineering), data structures and database systems (not part of information engineering), security (not part of information engineering) etc.. The former lists topics such as analogue signal processing (not part of computer science, and digital signal processing usually isn't either), control theory (not usually part of computer science). As far as I can see the only course that Computer Science and Engineering shares with information engineering is artificial intelligence.

* Thirdly, Computer Science and Engineering is more of a taught course rather than its own academic area (i.e. the opposite of information engineering).

As for the comment that "your article is just as much an advertisement pitch": I don't think that sort of comment is very helpful. I work in machine learning/control/signals; so I was just a bit surprised when I came across the Wikipedia article for information engineering and saw that it was only the ITE article (under the name "information engineering") instead of what most people I know would call information engineering, and so I thought it would be helpful to fix this. ArguMentor (talk) 23:44, 4 October 2018 (UTC)

No, it fails that criterion: "unambiguous". The term is ambiguous. A lot of people are using the "other" Information Engineering, too. And right now, you are just making up unsourced things on what YOU think is different. As mentioned before, you have not provided any reliable source that considers "information engineering" a discipline. You have provided some links that consider it to be a department, i.e., "more of a taught course"... just what you claim that it is not. You are making up thing, and failing to provide reliable sources. Just because the old IE article wasn't what you were looking for, does not mean your personal opinion is better than that. HelpUsStopSpam (talk) 23:41, 10 October 2018 (UTC)

No, you've misread/misunderstood WP:NCDAB. It says "When there is another term ... that is unambiguous", in this case Information technology engineering or Information engineering methodology are the another, unambiguous terms.

I've already provided reliable non-department sources such as the Turing Lecture [6] (more info on this lecture here). Most of the department links I gave are research departments; yes, they also teach, but that doesn't mean that the field is a "taught course" any more than the fact that mechanical engineering is taught at universities means that mechanical engineering is only a "taught course". Your refusal to accept these sources does not mean that there's a lack of reliable sources.ArguMentor (talk) 15:23, 11 October 2018 (UTC)

No, you are misreading it. That paragraph says that if there is a different term for your "Information engineering" that does not collide with anything, then you should rename your article to that term. This applies to the other IE: it seems that Information technology engineering is common enough (and not ambiguous) to use instead, rather than calling that other article non naturally "Information engineering (software engineering)". But it does not apply for the article name "Information engineering" which is ambiguous, so this article name should be a disambiguation page that points to all meanings. So propose an alternate name for your version of IE!

As you appear to insist that this is a "field"; I for now named the page "Information engineering (field)". But if you have some natural non-ambiguous term (i.e. other than Information Engineering), or a better proposal for the () term, then we can move it again. I suggest to first decide on this alternate name, then fix all the links that point to the disambiguation page now.

Obviously, there cannot be a doubt that "Information Engineering" isn't ambiguous, because all the references to the "old" IE. For example the Gartner, Hackathorn and European Union references above. This demonstrates that the primary IE page needs to be a disambiguation page!

I already told you that the Turing lecture shows that the term exists but not that the term is commonly considered to be a field or a domain rather than a study program. "does not mean that there's a lack of reliable sources" -- then please provide reliable sources, rather than linking to random university groups. HelpUsStopSpam (talk) 18:25, 11 October 2018 (UTC)

The paragraph says that if there's a different term for your "Information engineering" ("Information Technology Engineering") that does not collide with anything, then you should rename your article to that term. Look at it this way: there's Information Engineering 1 and Information Engineering 2, one of these is also called Information Technology Engineering and so can be moved to a different name.

The lecture clearly identifies information engineering as a research field. Claiming that this is somehow actually a study program is completely unsourced synthesis.

Please don't make controversial moves unilaterally. I'll ask an admin to revert this controversial page move until a consensus is reached. ArguMentor (talk) 18:41, 11 October 2018 (UTC)

In many european countries (german,french,polish,..) computer science is in their languages "informatik" or similar, which literally mean "information science and engineering". Note that "informatik" cover all computer- and information- realted branches of science and engineering, which in english have many names like computer science, computer engineering, informatics etc. This caused major translation problems, it would be good if there would be in english also common name for that area.

Requested move 11 October 2018

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: No consensus to move, so the status quo will be restored. This means moving the article currently at Information Technology Engineering will be moved back to its original location at Information engineering and the dab page moved accordingly. Obviously this leaves us in a less-than-ideal situation as far as disambiguating goes, but that can be mitigated with hat notes and BD2412's incoming link fixes. A RM can be started at any time to discuss moving either or both articles, but it's better to start from the status quo to avoid confusion. Cúchullain ^t/c 14:13, 31 October 2018 (UTC)

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Information engineering (field) → Information engineering – There were originally two pages, Information engineering and Information technology engineering. Someone else suggested moving "Information engineering" to Information engineering (field) since Information technology engineering is sometimes also called "Information engineering". I rejected this proposal since (as per WP:NCDAB), if there are two articles which could have the same name but one has another term ... that is unambiguous, then that article should have the unambiguous name (in this case, both can be called "Information engineering", but one of the articles also has the unambiguous name of "information technology engineering"). Furthermore, WP:NCDAB states that this is preferable to having parentheses in names. However, this other person ignored my rejection and controversially moved Information engineering to Information engineering (field); I am therefore requesting that this move be reverted until a consensus is reached. ArguMentor (talk) 19:07, 11 October 2018 (UTC) --Relisting. Dreamy Jazz 🎷 ^{talk to me | my contributions} 22:44, 19 October 2018 (UTC)

• Support - a key element you neglected to incorporate in your reasoning is WP:PRIMARYTOPIC. Assuming "Information technology engineering" is truly only sometimes called "Information engineering", then "Information engineering" is probably the primary topic. If that's the case, this is a no brainer. --В²C ☎ 00:30, 12 October 2018 (UTC)
  • Comment I'll just mention that "Information engineering methodology" is also used a bit to describe "Information technology engineering", although (like the term "information engineering") it seems to have been used more commonly in the 1980s/1990s. ArguMentor (talk) 09:21, 12 October 2018 (UTC)
• Oppose: The term "Information Engineering" is common for other topics, too such as Information technology engineering (just recently renamed by the proposing author), as witnessed by the sources given above. Gartner definition of "Information Engineering" refers to ITE, for example: [7]. PCMag defintion: [8]. EU refers to the other IE, too: [9]. This other use of the term, which is associated with Clive Finkelstein is very common, e.g. in the highly cited book (1407 citations on Google Scholar) Martin, James, and Clive Finkelstein. Information engineering. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989. And many more. Google Scholar mostly lists the "other" use. In fact I am all but sure that "Information Technology Engineering" is acutally the common term for the other IE. I could not find major sources using the term "ITE" for Finkelstein's IE. Because of this, the term is ambiguous, and should be a disambiguation page. However, @ArguMentor: appears to have a personal interest in pushing one definition over the other. I notice substantial POV pushing here. @Born2cycle: please review this evidence of ambiguity provided. HelpUsStopSpam (talk) 15:12, 13 October 2018 (UTC)

Comment On the topic of the naming of the information technology engineering, a literature review seems to indicate that the field used to be most commonly referred to as "Information Engineering" and "Information Engineering Methodology" in very roughly equal amounts in the 1980s/1990s (which explains why most of the sources given in the comment above are relatively old), whereas a lot of the links for "Information Technology Engineering" are much newer. If we wanted to go with the "most popular names of all time" then I'd suggest that having articles Information Engineering and Information Engineering Methodology would be the clearest option.

The main point I'm making however is simply that there are two articles, Information Engineering 1 and Information Engineering 2. We can naturally disambiguate one of these to Information Engineering Methodology/Information Technology Engineering (as per WP:NCDAB, this is preferred), and this lets us name the other article Information Engineering instead of Information engineering (field), which lets us avoid any parenthesis (and WP:NCDAB says that natural disambiguation is preferred to parenthesis). I think we can also make a common sense argument here: With my proposal we have two pages, with a total combined title length of 5 words and 0 parenthesis, the other proposal requires people to go through a third page, with a total title length of 6 words and 2 parenthesis. With my proposal we still have hatnotes at the top to link to the "other" page, so access is still very easy.

As for the (false) claim that I have a "personal interest": Yes, I admit that I'm an expert in this area, but the aricle is broad enough that I don't gain from this any more than a physicist gains from editing articles such as general relativity. By that logic physicists should be banned from having a say in articles about physics due to their "personal interest". ArguMentor (talk) 19:03, 13 October 2018 (UTC)

Significance is the better criterion. And since the important book mentioned is called Information Engineering, that would be the most appropriate term for the "other" IE. "Information Engineering Methodology" seems to be much less common (31k hits on Google!) as opposed to 5 million hits for "Information Technology Engineering" (although this seems to contain a lot of false positives because of companies using this as part of their name). Going by significance, the old "other" IE clearly wins, with the various work of Finkelstein https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=533075 - I still have not seen any highly cited work using your version of IE... HelpUsStopSpam (talk) 20:02, 13 October 2018 (UTC)

If there are two "Information Engineering" - and obviously there are two - then it usually is appropriate to use a disambiguation page with the ambiguous name, to direct users to either one, or the other. If you want one of them to be the "primary" topic, then -sorry- the "other" IE would win by significance (the Jupiter example, the planet wins). If we assume WP:NOPRIMARY, then the diambiguation page should bear the ambiguous name. And again: WP:NCDAB applies to choosing the alternate name. It says we should rather call the I(T)E Information technology engineering (which is a natural alternative, and more natural than Information engineering (software engineering)). The ambiguous term, however, is already out of the question at this point.

See WP:DABNAME: "The title of a disambiguation page is the ambiguous term itself, provided there is no primary topic for that term." - clearly, the primary topic, if any, would be the other - highly cited - I(T)E.

What you are claiming is that your IE is the primary meaning of that term, but you have not provided convincing sources of that being true. In fact, the sourcing of significance of your article is very weak. HelpUsStopSpam (talk) 20:02, 13 October 2018 (UTC)

• Oppose. Classic TWODABS situation. Andrewa (talk) 20:34, 18 October 2018 (UTC)
• Revert to the status quo ante for a proper discussion of the initial move. I have changed all the incoming links to point to Information engineering (field), as that was the article to which they were previously targeted, but please feel free to correct these if any of them should point to the other sense. bd2412 T 03:07, 27 October 2018 (UTC)

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The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Requested move 15 August 2023

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: Moved. (closed by non-admin page mover) SilverLocust 💬 23:01, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

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Information engineering (field) → Information engineering – "Information engineering" redirects here, and there is nothing else to disambiguate. The article which originally has that title is now named "Data engineering". 2003:ED:AF02:72B5:3D46:BE4:CF60:F864 (talk) 21:15, 15 August 2023 (UTC)

• Support per nomination. Uncontroversial technical request — {R from unnecessary disambiguation}. —Roman Spinner (talk • contribs) 23:28, 15 August 2023 (UTC)
• Speedy support per nom.--Ortizesp (talk) 01:13, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.