Another announcement by Google this week – one that didn’t get quite as much play as the launch at I/O of Google Play Music All Access and improvements to its search, map and Google + services – was this: Support for JSON-LD markup in Gmail.

The W3C in April published a Last Call Working Draft for JSON-LD 1.0 (JavaScript Object Notation for Linking Data), a lightweight Linked Data format to give data context. It has been shepherded along for some time by the JSON for Linked Data Community Group.

Manu Sporny, who has been instrumental in JSON-LD’s development and is one of the authors of the draft, heralds the news here in his blog, noting that it means that Gmail now will be able to recognize people, places, events and a variety of other Linked Data objects, and that actions may be taken on the Linked Data objects embedded in an e-mail. “For example, if someone sends you an invitation to a party, you can do a single-click response on whether or not you’ll attend a party right from your inbox. Doing so will also create a reminder for the party in your calendar,” he writes.

The news was greeted with enthusiasm on a W3C JSON LD message round, as, as Sporny describes it, “pretty big validation of the technology.”

While noting that Google followed the standard closely, Sporny does point out some issues with the implementation – including a major one that Google isn’t using the JSON-LD @context parameter correctly in its markup examples:

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Kay Ewbank of I Programmer recently wrote, “JSON Linked Data is getting closer with the publication of two Last Call Working Drafts by the W3C’s RDF Working Group and its JSON-LD Community Group. JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linking Data) is a lightweight Linked Data format designed to provide context for data and to help JSON data interoperate at Web-scale. Based on the JSON format, it is easy for humans to read and write at the same time as being easy for machines to parse and generate.  The first working draft is for JSON-LD 1.0, which sets out a common JSON representation format for expressing directed graphs; mixing both Linked Data and non-Linked Data in a single document. The aim is to provide a smooth upgrade path from JSON to JSON-LD, though any systems already using JSON can remain in their currently deployed state. JSON-LD aims to give you a way to work with Linked Data.” Read more

Last week David Rogers wrote about RDF tree. He said, “I want to make RDF data more developer-friendly. When you show a typical developer RDF, where they have previously been used to simple JSON or XML structures, they find the format confusing, and hard to code with. This is primarily because the data is a graph, and graphs don’t fit well with the tree structures of JSON and XML. I have seen this problem tackled through the use of libraries that can parse and interpret the graph data, and present an easier interface to the developer. Whilst these have been useful, I still think there are some fundamental problems. JSON-LD also offers a solution to this problem, but is not sufficiently lightweight for environments where data structures change and develop regularly. I compare my approach with JSON-LD at the end of the post.” Read more

Gregg Kellogg recently discussed a project which he is involved with called Wikia: “Wikia hosts hundreds of thousands of special-interest wikis for things as varied as pokemon, best cellphone rate comparisons, TV shows and Video Games. For those of you not aware of Wikia, it is an outgrowth of the MediaWiki and was founded by Jimmy Wales as a for-profit means of using the MediaWiki platform for exactly such interests. Recently MediaWiki Deutschland started work on WikiData, an effort to use Semantic Web principles to create a factual knowledge base that can be used within Wikis (typically to replace Infobox information, which can vary between different language versions). This is a somewhat different direction than Semantic Media Wiki, which is more about using Wiki markup to express semantic relationships within a Wiki. As it happens JSON-LD is being considered as the data representation model for WikiData.” Read more

Ivan Herman recently posted a demonstration on the W3C blog of a new feature that he has added to the RDFa 1.1 Distiller. Herman writes, “Up to today, the possible serializations were RDF/XML, Turtle, and N Triples. Although not yet final, I decided to add a JSON-LD serialization, too, in spite of the fact that JSON-LD is not yet final either (it is under development by a W3C Community Group). However, adding this to the system it shows the potentials of this combination.” Read more

On Friday, September 9, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about the latest document around the RDF 1.1 standard (a Working Draft). The Semantic Link panel was joined by special guest, David Wood, Co-Chair of the RDF Working Group at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

David Wood, 3 Roundstones

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