Modern Software : JSON-LD

Our industry never stops changing, but sometimes those changes are trivial and fluffy. Sometimes they are fundamental and enduring. This series is going to highlight some of the most important trends happening in the hardware, software, data and architecture spaces.

Modern software development needs to facilitate faster time to market, easier data integration and unlock new features for our applications, services and architectures. Incumbent to this vision is the need for a serialization format that is less about developer simplicity and more about flexible, evolvable and powerful systems. JSON-LD represents a vision for unifying the worlds of data, APIs and modern software systems. Useful in its own right, it also serves as the basis for much of the work being done in the standards world to engender annotations, activity streams, verifiable claims and more.

The modern software developer needs modern data models.

JSON-LD was developed in response to pushback to earlier standard serialization formats such as RDF/XML. It strikes a balance between developer-friendliness and support for LinkedData models built on standards. We are seeing a growing adoption of it as a format to project data and business value across a wider set of use cases than traditional Web APIs.

In this talk we will discuss the various JSON-LD file formats, tools for producing and consuming it, how it connects to the vision of the Semantic Web, how it can add value to any organization that needs to integrate information across sources with minimal need for consensus and coordination as well as how it is being used in an increasing number of important scenarios across industries.

We will cover:

• The RDF data model
• Various other standard serialization formats
• JSON-LD as a Web developer-friendly serialization
• Interacting with existing JSON APIs
• The Updated JSON-LD 1.1 Specification
• JSON-LD processing activities including: compaction, expansion, flattening and framing