Notation system

In linguistics and semiotics, a notation system is a system of graphics or symbols, characters and abbreviated expressions, used (for example) in artistic and scientific disciplines to represent technical facts and quantities by convention. Therefore, a notation is a collection of related symbols that are each given an arbitrary meaning, created to facilitate structured communication within a domain knowledge or field of study. Standard notations refer to general agreements in the way things are written or denoted. The term is generally used in technical and scientific areas of study like mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology, but can also be seen in areas like business, economics and music. Phonographic writing systems, by definition, use symbols to represent components of auditory language, i.e. speech, which in turn refers to things or ideas. The two main kinds of phonographic notational system are the alphabet and the syllabary. Some written languages are more consistent in their correlation of written symbols (or graphemes) with sound (or phonemes), and are therefore considered to have better phonemic orthography. Ideographic writing, by definition, refers to things or ideas independently of their pronunciation in any language. Some ideographic systems are also pictograms that convey meaning through their pictorial resemblance to a physical object. Various brackets, parentheses, slashes, and lines are used around words and letters in linguistics to distinguish written from spoken forms, etc. See . Nucleic acid notation Systems Biology Graphical Notation (SBGN) Sequence motif pattern-description notations Cytogenetic notation Energy Systems Language A chemical formula describes a chemical compound using element symbols and subscripts, e.g. H2O for water or C6H12O6 for glucose SMILES is a notation for describing the structure of a molecule with a plain text string, e.g. N=N for nitrogen or CCO for ethanol BNF (Backus normal form, or Backus–Naur form) and EBNF (extended Backus-Naur form) are the two main notation techniques for context-free grammars.