Syntax

A set of rules that defines the combinations of symbols that are considered to be correctly structured statements or expressions in a language or data format. Syntax therefore refers to the form of the data or code, and is contrasted with semantics – the meaning.

Examples

We can express semantically identical data (in this case metadata for a webpage header) using different syntaxes.

In HTML (HyperText Markup Language) with opengraph attributes:

<head>
    <meta property="og:type" content="article">
    <meta name="description" content="Science to build on">
</head>

In JSON (JavaScript Object Notation):

{
  "type": "article",
  "description": "Science to build on",
}

Useful syntaxes for metadata

We think the following syntaxes will be useful for definition of metadata (but this is by no means an exhaustive list:

OWL (Web Ontology Language)
JSON (Javascript Object Notation)
OpenGraph

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Last updated 2 years ago