🧩 SCE — Semantic Communication Encoding

SCE (Semantic Communication Encoding) is a lightweight symbolic ontology that enables humans, LLMs, and automated systems to communicate meaning using a compact set of standardized emoji-based semantic operators.

Instead of relying solely on natural language — which is ambiguous, verbose, and difficult for machines to interpret consistently — SCE provides a structured vocabulary where each emoji carries an explicit role, definition, and usage rule.

🧠 Think of SCE as a cross-lingual shorthand layer between reasoning and expression — useful in prompting, annotation, classification, compliance workflows, legal review, decision trees, and automated reasoning systems.

🚀 Why SCE Exists

Existing large language systems understand emojis implicitly — but there is no global shared semantic contract that defines what they mean.

SCE solves that problem by providing:

• A machine-readable ontology (TypeScript schema)
• A runtime interpreter that can parse and resolve meanings from text
• A validation layer to ensure semantic consistency
• A lookup and extraction API for tool builders

The core benefit: Replace verbose natural language with compact semantic symbols:

Before: "This is a non-negotiable fact that must remain true..." (28 tokens)
After: 📌 Student was injured on 11/06/24 (2 tokens for the symbol)

Result: ~93% token reduction + increased semantic precision.

👉 See the Prompting Guide for detailed token savings analysis and examples.

This makes semantic signals:

• Readable by humans
• Interpretable by LLMs
• Executable by downstream tools

📦 Core Features

| Capability | Supported | Documentation | | ------------------------------------------------ | :--------------: | ------------------------------------ | | Extract emojis from text | ✅ | CLI | | Map emojis → formal definition | ✅ | API | | Validate ontology uniqueness & structure | ✅ | API | | Use ontology programmatically (TypeScript types) | ✅ | API | | MCP server for LLM integration | ✅ | MCP | | CLI for terminal workflows | ✅ | CLI | | Generate emoji → meaning lookup table | ✅ | API | | Extend or replace the ontology | 🔧 Yes (modular) | Contributing |

📚 Ontology Structure

The ontology is divided into semantic domains, each containing symbol definitions:

export const SemanticOntologySchema = {
  structure: { ... },
  legalPolicy: { ... },
  reasoning: { ... },
  tasks: { ... },
  privacy: { ... },
  actors: { ... },
  state: { ... },
  control: { ... },
} as const;

Each definition adheres to:

interface SceSymbolDefinition {
  emoji: string;
  role: SceRole;
  meaning: string;
  allowedContext: SceContext[];
  usage: SceUsage;
  conflictsWith: string[];
  example: string;
}

🔍 Runtime API

Import the interpreter:

import { interpreter, getDefinitionsFromText } from "semanticencoding";

Extract meaning from free-form text

const text = "📝 Notify parents of outcome. ⏳ Pending response.";
const result = getDefinitionsFromText(text);

console.log(result);

➡️ This returns structured semantic metadata for each symbol found.

Parse raw emoji arrays

interpreter().forEmojis(["📎", "⏳"]);

🧪 Ontology Validation

Validate your ontology instance to ensure:

• No duplicate emojis
• Required metadata exists
• allowedContext values are valid

import { validateOntology } from "semanticencoding";

console.log(validateOntology());
// → [] if no issues

🧭 Emoji Map Utility

Useful when embedding semantic references in front-end UIs or prompts:

import { SemanticOntologyEmojiMap } from "semanticencoding";

console.log(SemanticOntologyEmojiMap.tasks);
// → { action: '📝', todo: '☐', complete: '✅', ... }

🧱 Extending SCE

SCE is intentionally modular and can be extended or forked:

import { interpreter } from "semanticencoding";

const CustomOntology = {
  ...SemanticOntologySchema,
  domain: { debug: { emoji: "🛠️", ... } }
};

const customInterpreter = interpreter(CustomOntology);

📍 Intended Use Cases

• Prompt engineering & LLM semantic signaling
• Document annotation / legal review workflows
• AI-assisted compliance and investigation tooling
• Knowledge representation / reasoning frameworks
• Case management and structured task systems
• Human–AI collaborative decision making
• Machine reasoning pipelines

🗺 Roadmap

| Stage | Status | | ------------------------------------------- | --------------- | | v1 Core Ontology | ✔️ Complete | | Validator + Interpreter | ✔️ Complete | | Prompt-side decoding utility | 🚧 In progress | | AI-assisted ontology expansion | 🧪 Experimental | | Plugin format (VSCode / Obsidian / ChatGPT) | Planned | | Community symbol proposals | Planned |

💡 Vision

SCE aims to become an open semantic layer enabling LLM-native communication protocols — similar to:

• Markdown (structure)
• Unicode (universality)
• RFC communication standards

…but optimized for compressed meaning, machine parsing, and human ergonomics.

📄 License

SCE Ethical Use License

🤝 Contributing

Contribution guidelines and governance are available online or in the repository documentation - CONTRIBUTING GOVERNANCE

Initial plans include:

• Symbol Proposal Process (SPP)
• Backward-compatibility guarantees
• Domain stewardship model

🏁 Quick Demo

Input:

📌 Student harmed on 11/06/24
🔍 Investigate witness list
☐ Notify OCR
⏳ Await reply

Parsed output:

[
  { "emoji": "📌", "role": "STRUCTURE", "meaning": "Pinned fact..." },
  { "emoji": "🔍", "role": "REASONING", "meaning": "Analysis step..." },
  { "emoji": "☐", "role": "TASK", "meaning": "Uncompleted action..." },
  { "emoji": "⏳", "role": "STATE", "meaning": "Pending action..." }
]

🧠 Project Status: Active Prototype

You are looking at a working draft of a standard.

If this resonates — help shape it. More information is available online and at our repository.