When writing the DataCrate spec I started using the same JSON-LD style as used here, where properties are in-line.
{
"name": "Dataset of repository sizes in CWL Viewer",
"description": "This is a simple dataset showing the size in bytes of the repositories examined by https://view.commonwl.org/ sinze September 2018",
"keywords": "CWL, repository, example",
"temporalCoverage": "2018-09/2019-01",
"contentLocation": {
"@id": "http://sws.geonames.org/9884115/",
"name": "Kilburn Building, Manchester, UK"
}
However, this is difficult to code against; to get the content location on the first mention you look for a contentLocation property, but on subsequent mentions you have to find the item by @id - but this is non-trivial to code.
We decided that the format should be optimised for ease of coding for linked-data-naive programmers. If you use flattened JSON-LD then it is trivial to index the @graph into a dictionary by ID and to traverse the @graph.
In DataCrate we also noted that we didn't expect hand-authoring to be much of a thing - and it's pretty easy to code tools that generate flattened JSON-LD.
Of course, if there were good libraries for using JSON-lD, and traversing the @graph then this would not matter, but as far as I know there are not.
ptsefton
commented
5 years ago
When writing the DataCrate spec I started using the same JSON-LD style as used here, where properties are in-line.
However, this is difficult to code against; to get the content location on the first mention you look for a contentLocation property, but on subsequent mentions you have to find the item by @id - but this is non-trivial to code.
We decided that the format should be optimised for ease of coding for linked-data-naive programmers. If you use flattened JSON-LD then it is trivial to index the @graph into a dictionary by ID and to traverse the @graph.
In DataCrate we also noted that we didn't expect hand-authoring to be much of a thing - and it's pretty easy to code tools that generate flattened JSON-LD.
Of course, if there were good libraries for using JSON-lD, and traversing the @graph then this would not matter, but as far as I know there are not.