Emergence can be described as a relationship between entities at different levels of organization, that looks especially puzzling at the transitions between the major levels of matter, life, cognition and culture. Indeed, each major level is dependent on the lower one not just for its constituents, but in some more formal way. A passage by François Jacob suggests that all such evolutionary transitions are associated with the appearance of some form of memory–genetic, neural or linguistic respectively. This implies that they have an informational nature. Based on this idea, we propose a general model of informational systems understood as combinations of modules taken from a limited inventory. Some informational systems are “semantic” models, that is reproduce features of their environment. Among these, some are also “informed”, that is have a pattern derived from a memory subsystem. The levels and components of informed systems can be listed to provide a general framework for knowledge organization, of relevance in both philosophical ontology and applied information services.

涌现可以被描述为组织不同层次实体之间的一种关系，在物质、生活、认知和文化等主要层次之间的转变看起来尤其令人费解。实际上，每个主要级别都依赖于较低级别，不仅是因为其成员，而且还以某种更正式的方式。弗朗索瓦·雅各布的一篇文章表明，所有此类进化转变都与某种形式的记忆——分别是遗传的、神经的或语言的——的出现有关。这意味着它们具有信息性质。基于这个想法，我们提出了一个信息系统的通用模型，将其理解为从有限库存中提取的模块组合。一些信息系统是“语义”模型，即再现其环境的特征。这其中，有的还“知情”，具有从内存子系统派生的模式。可以列出通知系统的级别和组件，以提供知识组织的一般框架，与哲学本体论和应用信息服务相关。