Changes in Community Group Drafts Targeted for 1.1

Since it’s original publication in 2014, JSON-LD 1.0 has become an essential format for describing structured data on the World Wide Web. Thanks, in part, to the adoption by schema.org as a recommended format, its use on the Web has grown enormously, used by between 10% to 18.2% of all websites.

Web Data Commons publication in November 2017

Of 26,271,491 domains crawled, 2,685,738 contained embedded JSON-LD 1.0.

W3Techs reports in January 2018

18.2% of all websites use JSON-LD 1.0.

In the time between its original publication by the RDF 1.1 Working Group, the documents have been maintained by the JSON for Linking Data Community Group which has had over 100 participants and filed around 100 issues. In response, the CG has worked to update the specifications and test-suite, accepting over 90 pull requests for a pending CG 1.1 release. These issues generally relate to allowing more natural JSON idioms to be expressed using JSON-LD:

• Allow contexts to be defined within term definitions (Scoped Contexts) that apply for values of that term (PR 445)
• Index values based on @id and @type (PR 449).
• Allow for deeper nesting of properties and values without introducing semantics (PR 451).
• Require @version announcement to enable new features (PR 473).
• Improve @container description to ensure values always take an array form (PR 503).
• Allow named graphs to be supported as values without the use of the @graph keyword (PR 549).
• Allow all values to be used in a map, through the use of a transparent @none index (PR 569).