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

1. Concepts – Capitalised terms (e.g. Person)
2. Attributes – Lowercase terms (e.g. full name)
3. Aliases – Alternatives in parentheses (e.g. Person (Natural Person))
4. Maps – Indicate omitted or incomplete data (e.g. ... irrelevant data not included)

content (data)

5. Attribute Defaults – Expected values (e.g. age: 42)
6. Examples (e.g. - Mark Zuckerberg)
7. Code – Inline snippets (e.g. for person in persons:)

Connection Types (How ideas relate)

1. is-a - Concepts organised hierarchically (indentation implies inheritance)

    Organisation
        Business

2. has-a – Concepts have attributes

    Person
        full name

3. value-is – Assign a value to an attribute

    full name: Gottfried Leibniz

4. has-another-name – Aliases using parentheses

    Person (Natural Person)

5. has-example – Instances of concepts, attributes or other examples

    Person
        - Mark Zuckerberg

6. 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)