Abstract

Under what conditions does data become information? Shannon’s measure-theoretic account deliberately brackets semantic uptake by treating information in terms of uncertainty, entropy, and transmission; Dretske’s semantic theory and Floridi’s General Definition of Information restore meaning at the cost of leaving the transition itself under-specified. We propose an activation account: information is not a property of data but an event in which data acquires informational status relative to an observer’s context. We formalize activation as a partial function φ_c(d, ω), mapping a datum d, an observer ω, and a context c to an activation outcome, and articulate seven foundational axioms (AX-1 to AX-7) governing partiality, syntactic preconditions, semantic activation, observer-dependence, contextual sensitivity, temporal transience, and mode-sensitive value. The axioms locate Shannon, Bateson, Dretske, Wand–Weber, DIKW, and Floridi PTII as partial accounts or limiting cases of the activation problem, and identify the points at which each prior account collapses two distinct relations into one. The result is a formal-conceptual foundation for information that is neutral between syntactic and semantic readings and that supplies a principled separation between data, information, and downstream epistemic states. We develop the framework as an architectural realization of the DIKCA I-layer.