In order to facilitate automated operations with software, semantic meaning of data values is bound to the syntactic type of the data values. In a described implementation, a piece of software accepts inputs and produces outputs. The inputs have a specified syntactic type (e.g., runtime type) and an expected semantic meaning. The semantic meaning corresponds to a real-world description of relevant data for the input. Providing a data set that matches the specified syntactic type and the expected semantic meaning as input to the software enables a relevant operation with the software to be performed. An example automated operation is the testing of a piece of software. In another described implementation, a synmantic data object is created and/or utilized that includes a syntactic type attribute and a semantic meaning attribute for the contained data value(s). Other optional attributes include locale indication and a validity flag.