objectwhat

Objectwhat is a term used in discussions of object identification and descriptive introspection in computing and information science. The term is often employed as a neutral placeholder to describe the question “What is this object?” and the information returned when answering it. In this framing, objectwhat refers to the collection of properties that uniquely identify an object and distinguish it from others, typically including the object's type or class, a unique identifier, and a minimal set of salient attributes. The concept is useful in explanations of data models, application programming interfaces, and debugging tools, where a compact representation of an object's identity and state is necessary.

Etymology and role: The word is a compound of object and what, used to emphasize the interrogative aspect of object description. In practice, objectwhat can be implemented as an introspection function or method that, given any object, yields a standard representation of its identity and essential fields. This makes it easier to reason about objects across different layers of a system.

Applications: In programming tutorials, objectwhat illustrates how to obtain a stable, serializable snapshot of an object for logging, debugging, or serialization. In ontology and knowledge graphs, a similar notion underpins the idea of an object's identity across contexts, sometimes tied to a URI or global identifier. The concept supports comparing objects, tracing provenance, and ensuring consistent references in distributed environments.

Examples: A debugging or logging scenario might have objectwhat return a small record containing the object's type, an optional id field, and a dictionary of key attributes. See also: object identity, reflection, introspection, serialization, provenance. This is a conceptual term and not a formal standard in any single language or framework.