= Inform: A cross-platform C library for information analysis of dynamical systems Douglas G. Moore douglas.g.moore@asu.edu v1.0.0, March 2018 :source-highlighter: pretty :stem: latexmath
Inform is a C libary designed to provide "easy" information analysis of complex systems. The primary use case for Inform is to wrap it in a higher-level language such as https://github.com/elife-asu/pyinform[Python] or https://github.com/elife-asu/rinform[R]. That said, Inform is definitely useful.
If you are interested in wrapping or using Inform itself, you'll definitely be interested in the documentation - https://elife-asu.github.io/Inform.
image:https://travis-ci.org/ELIFE-ASU/Inform.svg?branch=master[Build Status (Travis CI), link=https://travis-ci.org/ELIFE-ASU/Inform] image:https://ci.appveyor.com/api/projects/status/7y015h6p7n0q7097/branch/master?svg=true[Build Status (Appveyor), link=https://ci.appveyor.com/project/dglmoore/inform-vx977]
== Installation from Source
To build Inform, you will need to have https://cmake.org/[CMake]. Most of you can use your
package manager, e.g. apt-get, pacman or yum on Linux or homebrew, macports or
fink on OS X.
Installation requires the user to manually copy the headers and libraries to wherever the user would like. This project-by-project approach is standard for Windows development, as you probably know.
== Binary Installation Precompiled binaries can be found at https://github.com/elife-asu/inform/releases.
== Getting Help Inform is developed to help anyone interested in applying information-theoretic techniques get things done quickly and painlessly. We cannot do that without your feedback. We host the project's source code and issue tracker on https://github.com/elife-asu/inform[Github]. Please create an issue if you find a bug, an error in this documentation, or have a feature you'd like to request. Your contribution will make Inform a better tool for everyone.
If you are interested in contributing to Inform, please contact the developers, and we'll get you up and running!
Inform Source Repository:: https://github.com/elife-asu/inform
Issue Tracker:: https://github.com/elife-asu/inform/issues
== Related Projects
=== Inform Community While Inform is a great tool to use directly in C or C++, significant effort has gone into making it easy to wrap higher level languages. Here are a few of the wrappers that are under active developed:
.Inform Wrappers |=== | Package Name | Language | Repository | Website
| PyInform | Python | https://github.com/elife-asu/pyinform[elife-asu/pyinform] | https://elife-asu.github.io/PyInform
| rinform | R | https://github.com/elife-asu/rinform[elife-asu/rinform] | https://elife-asu.github.io/rinform
| Inform.jl | Julia | https://github.com/elife-asu/inform.jl[elife-asu/inform.jl] | forthcoming
| InformWolfram | Mathematica/Wolfram Language | https://github.com/elife-asu/informwolfram[elife-asu/informwolfram] | forthcoming |===
=== Intellectual Relatives Inform was not created in an intellectual vacuum. Many similar projects have preceded it and are under active development. All of those projects have advantages and disadvantages compared to Inform. If Inform doesn't meet your needs, I hope you will let us know, and try one of these:
== Copyright and Licensing Copyright © 2016-2018 ELIFE, Arizona State University. Free use of this software is granted under the terms of the MIT License.
See the https://github.com/elife-asu/inform/blob/master/LICENSE[LICENSE] file for details.
== Relevant Publications
Moore, D.G., Valentini, G., Walker, S.I. and Levin, M. (2018) "Inform: Efficient Information-Theoretic Analysis of Collective Behaviors" Frontiers in Robotics & AI. (under review).
Moore, D.G., Valentini, G., Walker, S.I. and Levin, M. (2018) "Inform: A Toolkit for Information-Theoretic Analysis of Complex Systems". In: Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence, Symposium on Artificial Life, IEEE Press. (in press).
== Support This project was supported in part by a grant provided by the Templeton World Charity Foundation as part of the link:http://www.templetonworldcharity.org/what-we-fund/themes-of-interest/power-of-information[Power of Information Inititive].