ABSTRACT
As our society advances in many scientific dimensions and invents new technologies, human knowledge is being expanded through observation, discovery, information gathering, and logic. Also, the access to newly generated information is becoming easier than ever as a result of computers and the Internet. We are entering an exciting era where electronic libraries, online databases, and information on every aspect of our civilization, such as patents, engineering products, literature, mathematics, physics, medicine, philosophy, and public opinions will become a few mouse-clicks away. In this era, computers can generate even more information from abundantly available online information. Society can act or react based on this information at the speed of its generation, creating sometimes nondesirable situations, for example, price and/or political volatilities. There is a great need to assess uncertainties associated with information and to quantify our state of knowledge and/or ignorance. The accuracy, quality, and incorrectness of such information and knowledge incoherence are coming under focus by our philosophers, scientists, engineers, technologists, decision and policy makers, regulators and lawmakers, and our society as a whole. As a result, uncertainty and ignorance analyses are receiving a lot of attention by our society. We are moving from emphasizing the state of knowledge expansion and creation of information to a state that includes knowledge and information assessment by critically evaluating them in terms of relevance, completeness, nondistortion, coherence, and other key measures.
