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.