Janleg

Janleg is a fictional conceptual term used in discussions of knowledge organization and documentation practices. It describes a hybrid approach that seeks to preserve human-centric narrative context while ensuring machine readability and interoperability. The term is not part of established academic terminology, but it appears in thought experiments, speculative writing, and demonstrations of data structuring.

The core idea of janleg is to blend two modes of representation: a narrative facet that captures tacit understanding, context, and community practices; and a legibility facet that imposes formal structure, controlled vocabularies, and machine-actionable metadata. The integration aims to reduce the loss of nuance during digitization and sharing, while keeping information accessible to both humans and systems.

Characteristics commonly associated with janleg include modular documentation units, each containing a story-like description, an explicit metadata schema, and cross-references to related units. It supports versioning, provenance tracking, and community edits. The dual representation is intended to improve searchability without sacrificing interpretive value, enabling smoother navigation between qualitative context and quantitative metadata.

Applications discussed in relation to janleg include archives, cultural heritage projects, and collaborative knowledge bases, as well as AI training data workflows. In these contexts, janleg aims to balance human-friendly narratives with precise labels, potentially reducing bias and improving explainability. Challenges cited include maintaining consistency between narrative and structured parts, avoiding fragmentation, and ensuring that the system remains scalable as content grows.

See also: dual coding, narrative intelligence, data governance, folk taxonomy.