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10 questions to ask and answer before designing JSON

• From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>
• To: "xml-dev@lists.xml.org" <xml-dev@lists.xml.org>
• Date: Wed, 27 May 2015 18:50:23 +0000

Hi Folks,

Thanks Rick, Michael, Marc, and James for your excellent feedback.

You've helped me realize that I need more info. I need to get several questions answered before I can decide on an approach for designing JSON. 

Below are 10 questions that I think must be answered before choosing an approach for designing JSON. Am I missing any questions? Are there other questions that must be asked and answered?  

/Roger

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      Get Answers to These Questions Before Creating JSON
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1. Interconvertibility: Is it important to be able to convert from XML to JSON and vice versa?

2. Emulate XML: Is it important that the JSON emulate the XML; i.e., is it important that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the XML and the JSON?

3. What's the Starting Point: Suppose you have a data model and you've serialized the data model to an XML encoding. Do you want to serialize the data model to a JSON encoding? Or, do you want to translate the XML encoding to JSON? In other words, what is your starting point for generating JSON: the data model or an XML encoding?

4. Processing Language: What programming language will you use to process the JSON?

5. Multiple Languages: Will the JSON be processed by multiple applications? Do all the applications use the same programming language or are various languages used?

6. Generic JSON Parser: Is it acceptable to process JSON with a general-purpose JSON parser (e.g., GSON)? A generic JSON parser understands JSON objects, arrays, strings, number, true, false, and null, but it doesn't understand "This special JSON object key indicates that the value is a URL" and "That special JSON object key indicates that the value is a datetime" and so forth.

7. Standards Organization: Is it important for you to use a W3C (ISO, IETF, etc.) standard when designing the JSON, e.g., the W3C JSON-LD standard.

8. Leverage RDF Tools: Is it important that the JSON is suitable for use with RDF and can be processed by the suite of RDF tools such as SPARQL? 

9. JSON Schema: Will you validate your JSON against a JSON Schema?

10. Significantly Different: Is it acceptable for the JSON design to be significantly different than the XML design?

GSON: http://www.studytrails.com/java/json/java-google-json-introduction.jsp 

JSON Schema: http://json-schema.org/latest/json-schema-core.html