Читать книгу Smarter Data Science - Cole Stryker - Страница 29

In Rudyard Kipling's 1902 book Just So Stories, the story of “The Elephant's Child” contains a poem that begins like this:

I keep six honest serving-men: (They taught me all I knew)

Their names are What and Where and When and How and Why and Who.

Kipling had codified the six primitive interrogatives of the English language. Collectively, these six words of inquiry—what, where, when, how, why, and who—can be regarded as a means to gain holistic insight into a given topic. It is why Kipling tells us, “They taught me all I knew.”

The interrogatives became a foundational aspect of John Zachman's seminal 1987 and 1992 papers: “A Framework for Information Systems Architecture” and “Extending and Formalizing the Framework for Information Systems Architecture.” Zachman correlated the interrogatives to a series of basic concepts that are of interest to an organization. While the actual sequence in which the interrogatives are presented is inconsequential and no one interrogative is more or less important than any of the others, Zachman typically used the following sequence: what, how, where, who, when, why.

 What: The data or information the organization produces

 How: A process or a function

 Where: A location or communication network

 Who: A role played by a person or computational agent

 When: A point in time, potentially associated with triggers that are fired or signals that are raised

 Why: A goal or subgoal revealing motivation