alpha (.aot)
Alpha is a lightweight, readable, text language. Designed for real-world cognitive and collaborative work, for teams who want to formulate, connect, communicate, and automate their knowledge. It’s not about organising information - Alpha helps you abstract meaning from existing knowledge and share understanding with others and yourself over time.
What is Alpha?
Alpha is built on a few powerful principles:
- I think uniquely, but I always extend existing thought structures to think.
- Structured thoughts are ideas that connect to each other.
- Knowledge works best when organised as a tree - not linear text, visuals, or code.
Elements
Alpha has ideas and connections between ideas to build structured thought. Here's how it works:
Idea Types (What you're describing)
context
- Concepts – Capitalised terms (e.g.
Person
)
- Attributes – Lowercase terms (e.g.
full name
)
- Aliases – Alternatives in parentheses (e.g.
Person (Natural Person)
)
- Maps – Indicate omitted or incomplete data (e.g.
... irrelevant data not included
)
content (data)
- Attribute Defaults – Expected values (e.g.
age: 42
)
- Examples (e.g.
- Mark Zuckerberg
)
- Code – Inline snippets (e.g.
for person in persons:
)
Connection Types (How ideas relate)
- is-a - Concepts organised hierarchically (indentation implies inheritance)
Organisation
Business
- has-a – Concepts have attributes
Person
full name
- value-is – Assign a value to an attribute
full name: Gottfried Leibniz
- has-another-name – Aliases using parentheses
Person (Natural Person)
- has-example – Instances of concepts, attributes or other examples
Person
- Mark Zuckerberg
- attribute-is-a-concept – Attributes that are also concepts
Years
age years: 5
Example: From RDF/Turtle to Alpha
Here’s the same information written in both Turtle (syntax) and Alpha.
Turtle
@prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> .
@prefix dc: <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/> .
@prefix ex: <http://example.org/stuff/1.0/> .
<http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-syntax-grammar>
dc:title "RDF/XML Syntax Specification (Revised)" ;
ex:editor [
ex:fullname "Dave Beckett";
ex:homePage <http://purl.org/net/dajobe/>
] .
Alpha
Report
- http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-syntax-grammar
title dc: RDF/XML Syntax Specification (Revised)
editor ex: Dave Beckett
Editor
- Dave Beckett
full name ex: Dave Beckett
home page ex uri: http://purl.org/net/dajobe/
Prefix (Namespace)
Dublin Core (DC)
uri: http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/
Example (Ex)
uri: http://example.org/stuff/1.0/
Resource Description Framework Syntax (RDF)
uri: http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#
is necessary for this example: no
This example shows how Alpha retains all structure and meaning — but in a clearer, more accessible format that is infinitely extendable.
Design Principles
Readability
- Use full words, fix misspellings
- No synonyms for the same thing
- Use singular terms consistently
Generality
- Avoid redundant concepts
- Use the most general valid term
- Add qualifiers where needed
Granularity
- Concepts should reflect their parts
- Only go deeper if it’s worth the effort
Inspiration
Alpha is influenced by:
- Charles Peirce’s How to Make Our Ideas Clear
- Leibniz’s Alphabet of Human Thought
- Practical modern software development
Ideal for knowledge workers
- Formulate and communicate complicated ideas effortlessly
- Reduce confusion and duplication
- Use as a problem solving tool or remembering problems already solved
- Documenting business knowledge for automating work with AI
Perfect for:
- Knowledge workers & analysts
- Business documentation
- Systems thinkers
[1] Aspects
True thoughts are hard won. They emerge from incorporating many aspects while myopic thoughts dies from not adjusting from self-contridiction and counter-examples.
- States
- Metrics
- Time
- Stakeholders
- Functions
- Entity
- Data Types (trees, graphs, associatives, composites)
- Location
- Operational (cause and effect)