JSON-LD

JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) is a JSON-based format for expressing linked data, standardized as a W3C Recommendation in January 2014. It uses reserved keywords like @context, @id and @type to let plain JSON documents be interpreted as RDF triples, and is the preferred encoding for Schema.org markup in HTML and the wire format for several W3C standards including Activity Streams and Verifiable Credentials.

JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) is a lightweight linked data format that expresses RDF graphs as ordinary JSON documents. It became a W3C Recommendation in January 2014 after work in the JSON for Linking Data Community Group, which was founded around April 2011 and chaired by Manu Sporny. Version 1.1 was published in 2020. A JSON-LD document is a normal JSON object that includes a special @context entry mapping short keys to IRIs, an optional @id identifying the resource, and an optional @type declaring its class. These reserved keywords let processors interpret the document as a set of subject-predicate-object triples without changing JSON's familiar tooling or syntax. Algorithms in the companion API specification can expand, compact, flatten and frame documents to convert between idiomatic JSON shapes and canonical RDF. JSON-LD is widely deployed for <a href="/knowledge/Schema.org" class="link" style="color: #D4A843;" title="Direct link to chunk">Schema.org Structured Data</a> markup, where it is embedded in HTML inside a script tag with type "application/ld+json". Google explicitly recommended it as the preferred format for structured data starting in 2017, and major engines including Bing, Yahoo and Yandex consume it for rich results and entity-graph ingestion. It is also used as an API payload format by the W3C Activity Streams 2.0 specification that underpins the ActivityPub fediverse protocol, by Verifiable Credentials, and by various government open-data portals. Its appeal is pragmatic: developers treat the document as plain JSON, while semantic-web tooling can still process it as RDF.

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