FAQ: What is "nano" about nanopublications, and how do they relate to micropublications?
What is "nano" about nanopublications, and how do they relate to micropublications?
The "nano" refers both to granularity and to formal structure. A nanopublication is the smallest publishable unit of information — a single assertion bundled with its own provenance and metadata — and it is expressed entirely in RDF, with every part machine-readable and individually citable. Micropublications, introduced by Clark, Ciccarese, and Goble (2014), target a related goal — fine-grained, machine-readable scholarly communication — but with a more narrative, paper-like orientation, mixing natural-language text with semantic annotations within a single document.