JSON schema

[dontcallmedom]

See http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/site-comments/2018Jan/0005.html and https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-handrews-json-schema/

[tidoust]

A few notes following discussions with Ben Hutton:

• All efforts are being tracked on the JSON Schema Web site
• Upcoming v07 draft of JSON Schema should be ready in a few months from now.
• Many tools still follow draft v04. Goal for standardization is not to rubber-stamp v07, but to find the right stable set of features for JSON Schema.
• JSON Schema's main strength and weakness is that it is used by many many companies and developers around the world, often for "small" schemas. So it's both pervasive and hard to single out a core set of companies that could drive the standardization effort.
• As such, if JSON Schema is to move to standardization, next step would be to assemble a standardization community around it. Idea could be to look at products that embed JSON Schema one way or the other, following the chain of dependencies on npm and others (e.g. the list of projects that depend on the json-schema library or the list of projects that depend on ajv)

[tidoust]

Another point to keep in mind for later, again if JSON Schema is to move to standardization: we would need to sort out copyrights and license for the document. The initial versions of JSON Schema were written by people who are no longer around. Also, I don't see any reference to licensing terms on json-schema.org.

[awwright]

@tidoust As far as licensing goes, as an IETF submission, all parts of the drafts are covered by RFC 5378 (as you're probably familiar, I'm not sure if that's sufficient though). Additionally, all of my work (which is around half of each of the documents) is public domain.

[handrews]

@tidoust I should double-check with my employer, but when I started working on the spec they had no concerns over it, and were familiar with IETF IP rules (other folks in the company have contributed to RFCs). Anything that I would personally have rights to I'm placing in the public domain. I'm pretty sure that 90% of the current draft has been reworked to some degree or another by either @awwright or myself, if that makes any difference. Of the past authors, only Gary Court has avoided replying to any effort to reach him. We've interacted with Krys and Geraint within the last few months, and I think Francis is active in other projects on GitHub.

[Relequestual]

@tidoust Apologies for still having not replied to your follow up email. Joining the W3C from a company perspective for me is not going to happen. I think we're focusing on getting draft-8 done now, but we'll set aside some time to discuss this soon!

[epicfaace]

@Relequestual Has the discussion on whether to move JSON Schema to W3C happened yet? I'm curious to know what the conclusion was.

[iherman]

The JSON Schema homepage has the following remark:

The JSON Schema project intends to shepherd all four draft series to RFC status. Currently, we are continuing to improve our self-published Internet-Drafts. The next step will be to get the drafts adopted by an IETF Working Group. We are actively investigating how to accomplish this.

In other words, it looks like the community has decided to go with the IETF and not with W3C. If this is confirmed, we should probably close this issue.

@tidoust ?

[handrews]

@iherman this has not been resolved one way or the other.

That statement is on the JSON Schema web site because unless/until a concrete new plan is present, there is no reason to take down the prior plan. We're still publishing IETF drafts (hopefully again by the end of this month, in fact).

However, the same issues that brought up the question of IETF vs W3C vs ??? still exist.

[iherman]

Thanks @handrews, good to know!

[epicfaace]

What are the general benefits/drawbacks/considerations for deciding to host a spec with IETF vs W3C?

[akuckartz]

What is the relation/compatibility with JSON-LD ?

[handrews]

@epicfaace it's discussed in detail at json-schema-org/json-schema-spec#526

In particular, as you can see at https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/json/w--4QtcF9remEI3FfGM6ghBFkEQ that the folks on the IETF JSON mailing list were very uninterested in the project. There are a couple of competing projects, none of which are widely used or implemented, which the IETF seems to prefer. The fact that many popular projects and products use JSON Schema, and have for many years, and in some cases are actively collaborating with us on the direction of the spec, seems to be completely irrelevant to the IETF folks.

For us at the JSON Schema project, it is important to continue to support our large existing user community. Since the IETF is only interested in starting over, at least for a standards-track RFC, it seems unlikely that we'll go that route. We could publish an informational RFC, though, which might be the fastest track to a "standard" (informational RFCs are, of course, not actually official standards, but they are at least published which is sometimes mostly what people want).

Speaking only for myself, I would expect having JSON Schema adopted by a standards group would result in further changes and refinements- that does not bother me. But I don't see the point in us throwing out what we have entirely and starting over, but still calling it JSON Schema.

[handrews]

@akuckartz I see the technologies as complementary.

JSON Schema essentially lets you do two things: assert conditions about a JSON instance document, and annotate that document with further information. Assertions and annotations can be combined such that annotations are applied conditionally depending on which assertions are found to be valid vs invalid.

You can also use those assertions and annotations without an instance to generate things related to the set of possible instances, such as a web form that can be used to construct an instance, or an OO class that can work with an instance in a particular programming language.

It does not specifically work with semantics (although the format keyword sort-of does, but format is a bit of a mess- it gets slightly better in the next draft, but fundamentally if you want to work with semantics you should go with JSON-LD).

I believe that JSON-LD could be mixed with JSON Schema using JSON Schema's annotation functions. Essentially, JSON Schema's format keyword attempts to annotate fields/objects/arrays in a JSON document with their semantic meaning, but is a very limited way of doing that.

It's been ages since I even looked at JSON-LD so I can't give a good example off the top of my head.