statuswhat

Statuswhat is a neologism used in information design to describe a portable, structured representation of the current state of an object, process, or resource. It functions as a generic metadata descriptor intended to be applicable across domains. The term combines 'status' with a generic 'what' to emphasize that the notion of status should be attached to a specific target rather than being an abstract label.

A statuswhat record typically includes fields such as target_id or object_id, item_type, status, timestamp, agent, and optional notes or rationale. In practice it may be implemented as a JSON object, a relational table row, or an API payload. The exact schema is deliberately flexible to accommodate different domains, but common patterns include a state value (for example open, in_progress, done), a time when the state was set, and the actor responsible.

Applications include project management to tag tasks, data governance to track lifecycle states, APIs to report the current condition of resources, and auditing for traceability. A concrete example might describe a ticket with status open, timestamp, and notes indicating blockers; in a data pipeline, a statuswhat could mark a data batch as 'validated' with a validation_id and reviewer.

Statuswhat is not a formal standard and has no single governing specification. It is mainly used in documentation and design discussions as a flexible shorthand for attaching state to a target. Its usefulness depends on clear definitions of the status values and consistent schema choices. Critics warn that without standard semantics, interoperability suffers.