To know data, you must know the lingo

Narrator: To know data, you must know the grammar of data, information and knowledge. Depending on the language and its precision, accuracy, and richness, we will have a reasonable idea of approaching data and information modelling issues. To know data and information, you must understand the business well. People with a technical background and little or no business knowledge are often oblivious to their ignorance regarding business data and information. When you have a technician in the industry who doesn’t understand this, it’s a problem. If your technician is located thousands of kilometres from your company, it’s a disaster waiting to happen. Let’s listen to Pete and Dud wax lyrical about the importance of language and grammar.

Dud: Pete, in a broad and profound sense, how important is it for a data or information architect to properly understand language?

Pete: It’s crucial, Dud. Extremely important. Suppose the architect only has a superficial idea of the language in question. In that case, more often than not, they’ll be pissing up against the wall whilst simultaneously thinking they are doing a good job.

Dud: According to my notes, Immanuel Kant said, “You only know me as you see me, not as I actually am”. How relevant is that, Pete?

Pete: Imagine a Monday when a new hi-tech company gets listed on the stock exchange, and its price is set at a hundred euros. This company has developed a faster computer processor than the mysterious shadow of Lucky Luke.

Dud: Okay. Deal the cards, Pete.

Pete: On Tuesday, the price rises to two hundred Euros.

Pete: On Wednesday the price increases to three hundred Euros. It’s five hundred Euros on Thursday and closes at eight hundred euros on Friday. All good?

Dud: All good, Pete!

Pete: What price does the stock achieve the following Monday, Dud?

Dud: One thousand and three hundred euros, Pete?

Pete: No, Dud.

Dud: No?

Pete: No. On the weekend, it was discovered that the new chip couldn’t operate for more than an hour without overheating, so the stock price crashed on Monday’s opening.

Dud: Blimey! So, sound data, information and knowledge are essential, Pete, especially when understanding real nature, content and relations.

Pete: Very relevant, Dud. It’s easy to be fooled by appearances. We are trained from birth to recognize patterns, second-guess progressions, and series, as well as make assumptions, and very often when there is a large degree of possible error.

Dud: I see. So, in your view, what are the most essential language aspects we should know if we pretend to be serious, informed, and professional in data and information architecture and management?

Pete: Straightforward, Dud. Let me walk you through some of the critical criteria and definitions. It’s a challenging path, Dud, but well worth the effort.

Dud: Okay! I agree! It’s a fascinating world, Pete, but my knowledge of it has never been excellent. In fact, I knew very little about it until I started to learn Spanish.

Pete: Can you imagine an architect being told to design a house with a lot of light, space, and countryside views, and the architect proposes a windowless house with digital views of the countryside and space defined in arbitrary terms unfit for human consumption?

Dud: He would be told to piss off, Pete.

Pete: Exactly. But this is what many IT services companies do, and they are very rarely told to piss off.

Dud: Scummy dog-breath cheating bastards! Oops, sorry, Mister Manners!

Pete: Okay! So, first off the bat? We have honesty! What do I mean? Please don’t pretend you know stuff when you don’t. And for God’s sake, don’t try to wing it, which can lead to massive screw-ups, death-march projects, and substantial personal and professional damage. It’s a fundamental fact, Dud, I bloody hate dishonesty. Especially when it involves colleagues lying to colleagues.

Dud: Sounds familiar. IT service companies are hugely skilled at this.

Pete: Yes, Dud, they are. So, let me start with a few things that I consider essential. First, let’s touch on context. It’s a very relevant theme, Dud. If we can’t communicate context, we leave ourselves open to misinterpretation, second-guessing and an avoidable tower of Babel-style screwup. Context is a guide, an anchor and a reassurance. It’s a lighthouse in a storm, a signpost on the highway and a scenery in which our communications make sense, provide cohesion and become cohesive. Context is critical to almost all constructive and creative communication.

Dud: I think context doesn’t give the treatment it deserves if it is addressed. Context in IT is like a hen’s teeth.

Pete: We need to understand the sense of intentionality. Sometimes, this isn’t so obvious, so we have to make an extra effort to understand the communicator’s intention versus what the communicator is communicating literally. We also need to gauge the honesty, or not, of the communicator and the degrees of honesty that might be present. Accurate, false or partially true.

Pete: We need to understand the imperfections of communications and languages. Intentionality is a massive area of study. We need to realise that the language of humans is not the language of machines. We need to prioritise human interaction and not pretend that machine talk, for as clever as the AI behind the scenes might be, it should never be considered on a par with that human interaction. For your information, Dud, the intentional stance is a term coined by philosopher Daniel Dennett for the level of abstraction in which we view the behaviour of an entity in terms of mental properties. Intentionality is said to be part of a theory of mental content proposed by Danel, which provides the bedrock of his later designs on free will, consciousness, folk psychology, and evolution.

Dud: I wish I had known all this when I was a nipper, Pete. Mention the bible, and everyone shuts up. Mention some Hollyweird religious productions, and everyone is a bloody theologian.

Pete: Tell me about it, Dud!

Dud: Damn straight, Pete!

Pete: Next, we need to understand the implicit, the explicit and the differences between them. We must understand what is explicit, the unavoidable and visible presence, and what isn’t stated but is implicit and present. The ability to understand the difference between explicit and implicit knowledge and information in the context of a business mandates the need to have the minimum required knowledge and experience to be able to do that.

Pete: Definitions. We all know definitions when we meet them. The definers of things, even of themselves.

Dud: Okay!

Pete: In our communications, we invariably come across contradictions, so it’s good that we can identify contradictions, understand what they are and manage them. They can arise for various reasons, but mainly because we and collections of us have different lenses when we interpret things. But contradictions are not to be feared, just assumed, understood and contextualised.

Dud: I always find that an ability to spot, analyse and explain contradictions is a talent worth having.

Pete: Social constructs?

Dud: Eh?

Pete: Social constructs, Dud.

Dud: Yes, language is intrinsically linked to social constructs. Food, sex, relationships, humour, feelings, they are all in the mix. Social constructs govern and constrain how we communicate, and we communicate via human language. Unless we aspire to be clown shoes. Or, as my digital friend would have it, understanding social constructs helps us recognize that much of our social reality is shaped by human interactions and agreements rather than inherent qualities.

Pete: So, let’s look at some of the more traditional aspects of language. First, I will start with nouns. Nouns are simply names for a whole range of things. Typically, people, places, animals and things. Examples of nouns are computer, Carmen, internet, film, cat, dog, Cordoba, book and actor. In English, there are ten types of nouns. In Spanish, there are eight.

Dud: Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight! Long John Saliva was the spit if his old man!

Pete: Yes, well!

Narrator: Pete avoids the nonsense.

Dud: Sorry, Pete!

Pete: The ten types of nouns in English are common nouns, Dud, like city, town, village and hamlet; proper nouns, like Madrid, New York, Beijing, Buenos Aires, and London; singular nouns, such as banana, peach and tomato; plural nouns, such as bananas, apples, grapes and pears; collective nouns such as union, team and family; compound nouns such as ice cream, concrete nouns such as table, chair and carpet; abstract nouns such as anger, ecstasy and delight; countable nouns such as a book, photo and player; and uncountable nouns such as data, information and knowledge.

Pete: Then there are adjectives.

Dud: Like what, Pete?

Pete: Dud, an adjective, typically provides additional information about a noun. For example, we have a red house, where the house is the noun and red is an attribute of that noun. An adjective expands the view. Other examples include an intelligent woman, a tall tree, a French dish, and a Spanish actress. It’s funny, isn’t it, Dud, but it’s pretty often about adding information to information. When this is absent, we get into all sorts of rubbish with ill-equipped and rooky data and information architects.

Dud: I see! A sly fox!

Pete: Next up are articles, words that are used with nouns. They are words like a and the. For example, ‘a cup of tea’, where the article is ‘a’. ‘The mug of coffee’, where ‘the’ is the article. And, she is an honest boss, where ‘an’ is the article. Do you get me,

Dud? What an article he was!

Dud: As clear as daylight, Pete.

Pete: Good!

Dud: Thanks, Pete.

Pete: Now for the pronoun. A pronounis a word that substitutes the repeated use of a noun. Like nouns, pronouns can refer to people, things, concepts, and places. Most sentences contain at least one noun or pronoun.  It’s pretty easy, actually, Dud. Here’s an example. Are you going to eat that liver raw? No, I’m going to clean it, I am going to cook it, and then I am going to eat it. As you can see, in the reply to the question, we replace ‘liver’ with ‘it, ‘ okay?

Dud: Makes perfect sense, Pete.

Pete: Glad you liked it, Dud.

Dud: I do, especially with lots of onions and gravy.

Pete: Next, we have verbs. Words used to describe an action, state, or occurrence and forming the central part of the predicate of a sentence, such as to listen, to see, to transfer, to write, to read, to play, to talk and to be.

Dud: Got it in one, Pete.

Pete: Adverbs come next, and according to the Cambridge folk, adverbs are “one of the four major word classes, along with nouns, verbs, and adjectives. We use adverbs to add more information about a verb, an adjective, another adverb, a clause or a whole sentence and, less commonly, about a noun phrase.” Adverbs have many different meanings and functions. They are essential in indicating the time, manner, place, degree, and frequency of something. In other words, adverbs add information or increase the power and explicitness of a word or an expression.

Dud: Hey, Pete, is that it?

Pete: No, Dud! We must include interjections and a couple of other things for completeness. Interjections include words like yes, no, oh, yeah, hi, hey, wow, hello, ah, ha, blah, eh, yep, o, alas, haha, cheers, huh, and hmm.

Dud: Blimey!

Pete: So, what are prepositions? A preposition is a word or group of words used before a noun, pronoun, or noun phrase to indicate direction, time, place, location, spatial relationships, or to introduce an object. Examples of prepositions include words like “in,” “at,” “on,” “of,” and “to.”

Prepositions in English are highly idiomatic, Dud; they use, contain, or denote natural expressions to a native speaker. Although there are some rules of usage, much of the use of prepositions is dictated by fixed expressions. In these cases, people consider memorising phrases better than the individual preposition.

Dud: Sometimes, we must go past formulas and seek out constructions that defy rational explanations.

Pete: In the penultimate position, we have conjunctions. In grammar, a conjunction is a word that connects words, phrases, or clauses. There are three main types of conjunctions: coordinating, subordinating, and correlative. Conjunctions play a crucial role, Dud, in creating complex and compound sentences, helping to clarify relationships between ideas.

Dud: Makes perfect sense, especially in the world in which we live.

Pete: Lastly, we have subjectivity. Subjectivity in grammar refers to the degree to which a statement reflects personal opinions, feelings, or interpretations rather than objective facts. It often involves the use of language that expresses attitudes, beliefs, or emotions. It frequently carries a certain degree of uncertainty, impossibility or even ridiculousness. In some languages and cultures, it is far more critical than in others. It can also carry a moral and human dimension.

Regarding grammatical structures, subjectivity can manifest itself in several ways, such as mood, adjectives and adverbs, modality, and personal pronouns.

Dud: Simone de Beauvoir said something about emotional intoxication, allowing one to grasp existence in oneself and in the other as subjectivity and passivity. The two partners merge in this ambiguous unity; each is freed of his presence and achieves immediate communication with the other.

Pete: Good catch, Dud!

Dud: I had a friend who lost his Spanish partner because of his inability to grasp the importance of the subjunctive and use it. This is what we have arrived at. I now refer to my wife as my partner.

Pete: Good God! What’s the world coming to? It’s going to the dogs!

But, then we have mood. Using different moods, such as indicative, subjunctive, and imperative, can indicate subjectivity. For example, the subjunctive mood often expresses wishes or hypothetical situations.

Dud: I wish I had known that neigh, if only I had known that, Pete.

Pete: Then there are adjectives and adverbs! Words that convey opinions or emotions can indicate subjectivity. For example, ‘The movie was amazing’ expresses a personal opinion.

Dud: I can’t be arsed, also, Pete?

Pete: Well. Let’s not rush down the rabbit hole.

Dud: Indeed. The IT dog and pony show has a nasty habit of adopting the Alice in Wonderland strategy.

Pete:  I wouldn’t argue with that, Dud.

Dud: Nor me, Pete.

Pete: Then, next up, we will have modality. Modal verbs, such as could, should, or might, can introduce subjectivity by expressing possibility, necessity, or obligation. For example, “You should try that restaurant” suggests a personal recommendation.

Dud: You should try this Galician wine, Pete. It’s excellent.

Pete: Now, let’s address personal pronouns. They are just what they say they are. First-person pronouns, such as I and we, often indicate subjective statements as they convey the speaker’s perspective.

Dud: Fascinating in its everyday presence. Where would we be without our personal pronouns? Knock ‘em out!

Pete: In general, subjectivity is crucial in distinguishing between objective statements, ones based on facts, and subjective statements, based on personal opinions.

Dud: To perform well as a data and information architect, do you really need to know the grammar and vocabulary of the culture in which you both live and work?

Pete: Yes, Dud. That quite nicely sums it up. Both social and business culture.

Dud: The quality of our understanding depends on many factors, Pete.

Pete: Indeed it does, Dud.

Martyn Jones, Madrid, 15th October 2024