General Guidelines

IbiScript is designed to be intuitive, flexible, and easily typed on standard European keyboards, while maintaining maximum compatibility with the established Leiden System.

Unless explicitly stated otherwise, the system’s parsing logic is agnostic to white spaces or line breaks. This makes IbiScript robust against minor formatting inconsistencies and, above all, prioritizes explicit semantic encoding over visual layout.

The notation is defined using a specific set of reserved Unicode characters (the STOP_SET sequence). To use any of these characters as literal text, an escaping mechanism is provided via the backslash \ character.

The question mark ? acts as a low certainty operator. While it generally indicates a doubtful interpretation by the editor, its specific meaning adapts to the phenomenological context: for instance, in the case of gaps, the ? operator shifts the description from an exact measurement to an approximate estimate.

Conversely, the exclamation mark ! acts as a high certainty or precision operator. It expresses a strong and definitive editorial assertion regarding the described phenomenon; in the context of measurements, the ! operator guarantees the pinpoint precision of the quantitative data provided, explicitly excluding any margin of approximation or executive uncertainty.

Some phenomena support an extended syntax for metadata, expressed as a sequence of label:value pairs separated by semicolons. Values may themselves contain plausibility notation, allowing the editor to express graduated judgements over alternative readings — a feature documented in detail in the plausibility assessment section (cf. Interpretative Plausibility Assessment) and referenced in the sections of each phenomenon that supports it.