Socrates was an ancient Greek philosopher who led his students to the discovery of truth by asking them leading questions rather than offering them easy answers. Thus, he was one of the first teachers to educe rather than educate his students. His questions drew out and revealed their inherent knowledge, judgement, and intuition, as well as their assumptions and decisions. Thus, they learned to think for themselves. Socrates forced them to construct their own answers rather than spoon feeding them.
The Socratic approach is one of the key elements of the EDUCE process. Asking questions encourages domain and usage authorities to be responsible and accountable for the conceptual models used to develop a software solution. The questions identified below obtain important information for a conceptual model. Remember to ask these questions to obtain elements missing from statements made by domain and usage authorities. Some of these questions elicit concepts and some elicit roles and relationships between concepts. The questions are organized into groups based the kinds of answers they produce. Each groups is one of the root conceptual types identified by Sowa.
J. F. Sowa. Conceptual Structures - Information Processing in Mind and Machine. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1984.