Introduction to JSON-LD for those who don’t want to know but have to know

Whether you want to or not, to understand modern data sharing, you’ll need to understand a bit about the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) data structure because that is how data is shared in today’s world.

JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), pronounced jay-sahn (for all you gif/jiff folks), is a subset of JavaS-cript – a method of storing and transmitting information in an organized manner. JSON provides a text-only format specifically for transferring data between servers, through APIs, etc.

As great as HTML is for communicating between humans, JSON is excellent for communicating with AI systems, as it sends very structured data along with human-readable data. The JSON code is not interleaved with the user-visible text.

JSON is faster, less verbose, and therefore more efficient than the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) preferred for quite some time by the US government and other organizations.

JSON-LD adds the extension "LD" for Linked Data, a way of publishing the data that allows references (the linked data) between authoritative sources.