What is JSON-LD?

A short introduction to JSON-LD for Web developers, designers, and hobbyists. It covers how to express basic Linked Data in JSON. If you have any questions, hit me up on Twitter: @manusporny or G+: Manu Sporny

• Category

  Science & Technology

[Rex Su]

I have a question, so the "@context" part of JSON-LD points to a url with specific definition of each of the keys used in the JSON, like what "name" means and what "homepage" means. But what do I expect if I navigate to those links? Should they return any kind of machine readable data or just html page??

[Manu Sporny]

Ideally, they would return an HTML page that is machine-readable (by embedding RDFa tags in the HTML page, you can make it machine-readable).

[Melanie Bruce]

I am loving the idea of this.. but I could use some help tying it together. Lets say I have data for the locations of all the schools in PA. How do I know what their unique Identifiers are? how do I find other people who have data about PA schools in JSON-LD format? Since the JSON data does not appear until it is requested from a server, how can I search for it?

[Manu Sporny]

More thoughts on finding PA school data - it probably doesn't exist right now at all. I would expect either the PA state government or the federal government to publish that data. Most likely through the department of education. You'd have to convince them to publish that data in JSON-LD format, which might not be too difficult to do as governments around the world are some of the best early adopters of Linked Data.

[Rex Su]

Interesting, but let's say right now we don't have an authentic source of this information, and people starting making their own identifiers for their own school directories. Does that defeat the purpose of having identifiers?

[Manu Sporny]

No, it doesn't defeat the purpose. The assumption is that there will always be bad data out there. The nice thing about Linked Data is that since we have global identifiers, you can link reputation to those identifiers. The data that you use is based on who you trust. Since you can identify who you trust in an unambiguous way using URLs, you can specify what data sources you trust in an unambiguous way.

[Manu Sporny]

Good to hear - hoping to put a "Advanced JSON-LD Tutorial" together in the next couple of months.

[Li ChunYuan]

讲的不错哦

[Norman Flecha]

Great job on this tutorial. I am into Drupal and it already has modules for it thank you.

[Andruid Kerne]

If you are looking for free and open source software to work with this data, and complex, nested data models that its part of, using any information source publishing the data on the web, without needing to depend on them publishing with linked data, check out interface ecologylab bigsemantics

[Anthony Pantekoek]

Very interesting. I've just started getting into JS development so this is something worth checking out.

[1990banks]

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