JSON-LD (JSON for Linked Data) was standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as a recommendation on January 16, 2014. JSON-LD is a lightweight data interchange format that extends JSON with additional semantics for expressing relationships between entities, making it particularly useful for describing structured data on the web.
Some common use cases of JSON-LD include:
Structured Data Markup: JSON-LD is used to markup structured data on web pages to improve their visibility and interpretability by search engines. It allows webmasters to annotate content with metadata such as product information, reviews, events, organizations, and more, helping search engines understand and index the content more accurately.
Linked Data Publishing: JSON-LD is used to publish linked data on the web, allowing organizations to expose their datasets and resources in a machine-readable format. It enables the creation of linked data graphs where entities are interconnected through standardized vocabularies and ontologies, facilitating data integration, discovery, and reuse.
API Responses: JSON-LD can be used as a format for representing API responses in web services and RESTful APIs. It provides a standardized way to express complex data structures, relationships, and metadata in API payloads, improving interoperability and developer experience when consuming and integrating with APIs.
E-commerce and Product Catalogs: JSON-LD is employed in e-commerce applications to describe product catalogs, inventory, pricing, and promotions in a structured and standardized format. It allows retailers to expose product data in a machine-readable way, enabling seamless integration with search engines, comparison shopping engines, and other online platforms.