Following the ISO principles of semantic annotation (ISO 24617-5:2016; see also Bunt, 2015) the formal specification of QuantML consists of four parts:

1. the metamodel, which presents a visualised overview of the concepts that may occur iin QuantML annotations, and the relations between them;
2. the abstract syntax, which gives a recursive definitions of well-formed annotation structures in the form of n-tuples of elements which are either basic concepts, taken from a store of concepts called the 'conceptual inventory', or annotation structures;
3. a concrete syntax, which defines an XML-based representation for annotation
4. a semantics, which defines the meaning of QuantML annotation structures by means of a compositional translation of these structures to Dicourse Representation Structures (DRSs).