Information disciplines are changing from their historical grounding in computing, management information systems and library sciences towards a mainstream assimilation within other disciplines including accounting, marketing, law, the physical sciences and media studies (to name a few). In light of this, new disciplines such as health informatics, art informatics, and bioinformatics, along with specialised subareas such as knowledge management are emerging. These and many other applications of informatics in traditional disciplines are becoming more important as IT/IS becomes fully mainstreamed.

This book is also a response to developments in IT/IS curricula in Australia and internationally. All universities offer an Information Systems programme and IS, already normal both in business schools and in IT schools, is widely repositioning as servicing applied informatics fields. A number of emerging courses in the informatics and Knowledge Management area could potentially adopt a book such as this (these numbers are predicted to rise). Universities including Griffith, Murdoch, Monash, Sydney, Canberra, Flinders, NTU, CQU, UWA, Latrobe, Ballarat and the University of Wollongong all now conduct bachelors and/or masters courses in Informatics, or full degrees, particularly in Business Informatics and Health Informatics but also in Arts and Science subjects. Other universities have created separate faculties for Informatics subjects for example CQU has a faculty of Informatics and Communication, and Wollongong has a faculty of Informatics, and these host a range of the cognate subjects in informatics such as information systems and computing science.