symbolsett

Symbolsett is a proposed open standard for organizing and encoding symbolic representations across disciplines. It provides a unified schema to catalog symbols used in mathematics, science, linguistics, computing, and visual design, embedding semantic metadata and usage guidance. Initiated by a cross-disciplinary coalition in the early 2020s, Symbolsett aims to complement Unicode by adding domain-specific context and relationships between symbols.

A Symbolsett entry, or symbol record, includes a canonical identifier, the glyph, a formal name, an English label, domain tags, semantic meaning, usage rules, and example contexts. Each symbol can have aliases, optional Unicode references, and links to related symbols via relations such as subclass of, opposite, or container. The standard emphasizes extensibility, versioning, and machine-readable metadata in formats such as JSON or RDF-like structures.

Applications include digital typography, content localization, educational platforms, knowledge graphs, and symbolic computation environments. Symbolsett enables consistent rendering, searchability, and semantic interpretation of symbols, supports multilingual labels, and helps curate domain-specific glossaries.

Governance is community-driven. Symbolsett development proceeds through proposals, public reviews, and consensus-based updates. The licensing is designed to encourage use in research and education and to support integration into commercial software under reasonable terms.

Symbolsett is designed as a complementary layer rather than a replacement for Unicode. By attaching context and relationships to symbols, it aims to improve interoperability among tools, datasets, and platforms that rely on symbolic notation.