Open Language

# Aims The future of society is increasingly digital. Access to employment, banking, education and democratic institutions are increasingly mediated by digital technology. Passport, identity, the algorithms that affect all our lives and even our laws are increasingly being drafted and represented in digital form – in Code.

Open Language aims to provide a simple democratic interface to this digital world of future citizenship, not mediated by a graphic user interface but directly in the language. The code is the law, and this code should be democratically accessible, that is understandable by everyone and easily created by individuals or communities anywhere in the world. Open Language aims to be a universal language of Governance.

# What it is not It is not an attempt to create full natural language processing, rather it is a constrained language with limited scope and grammar. It is based on existing research, and designed for the future web.

# Technology Open Language is based on Lexon, and is able to transpile to a number of targets including JavaScript, and a number of languages for common blockchains such as ethereum and the eternity chains.

Our current research aims are to make this language accessible to a wider community, by linking it to the Wikifunctions initiative of the Wikimedia Foundation. There are two aspects of this relationship that we are in the process of researching in order to lead to a specification. These are: 1. We aim to make Open Language able to transpile to the json based representation of the wikifunctions abstract syntax tree formalisation. 1. We aim to leverage an subset of the wikidata’s crowdsourced graph database of lexemes (as used by the Abstract Wikipedia initiative) as the basis for new constrained natural language versions of Open Language.

# History Open Language benefits from the research and learning based around literate language design, together with modern advances in compiler technology which make such language design increasingly easy, lightweight and and able to run at near native speed. WC3 standards such as wasm, and open source initiatives like Oracle Labs Truffle and GraalVM show what is possible in terms of universal runtimes.

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Lexon is a contract programming language for lawyers.