The alphabet of human thought (Latin: alphabetum cogitationum humanarum) is a concept originally proposed by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz that provides a universal way to represent and analyze ideas and relationships by breaking down their component pieces.
[5] In the early 18th century, Leibniz outlined his characteristica universalis, an artificial language in which grammatical and logical structure would coincide, allowing reasoning to be reduced to calculation.
There are quite a few mentions of the characteristica in Leibniz's writings, but he never set out any details save for a brief outline of some possible sentences in his Dissertation on the Art of Combinations.
In modern terminology, Leibniz's alphabet was a proposal for an automated theorem prover or ontology classification reasoner written centuries before the technology to implement them.
[6] John Giannandrea, co-founder and CTO of Metaweb Technologies, acknowledged in a 2008 speech that Freebase was at least linked to the alphabet of human thought, if not an implementation of it.