https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40440086

"Motor = something that puts into motion". "Engine = an ingenious, clever contraption". Related, but from an abstract point of view, referring to different concepts.

Question: like Unicode encodes characters, glyphs, emojis etc, does there exist something which does the same, but for abstract concepts?

With "abstract concept" I mean anything that is commonly described using words (using different words in different languages), or specific symbols in some written languages, sometimes a drawing, schematic, animation, a snippet of pseudo code, etc. That may have their own Wikipedia page. Or be at the heart of a scientific theory.

Both words & symbols may refer to abstract concepts. But there are many words that don't, many symbols that don't, many different words used to describe the same concept, or words that refer to different concepts (depending on context). In short: a word, symbol etc does not map 1:1 to an unambiguous, abstract concept.

I'd imagine if you'd want to squeeze the "collective knowledge of humanity" in the smallest possible space, or build a database of expert knowledge in some field(s), this would be useful. I can also imagine that for such databases (expert systems?) ad-hoc implementations of the above have been done (?). Or that such a generic encoding would have other uses.

But generalized, standardized, like Unicode? Anything similar / related, but not quite the same?

Btw: if no such thing exists, then it should be created.