Web Things, by Mark Baker

Tap, Tap. Is this thing on? So if you’ve read this blog at all in the past, you know that this topic pops up every so often. That would be because it’s difficult. The context for this instance of the discussion is a Twitter thread started by Erik

let's say your JSON-LD takes over the world. how does the context URI provider cope/scale? anybody thinking about non-#HTTP context URIs?

— Erik Wilde (@dret) February 9, 2016

I argue that what Erik called “by value” semantics, violates REST’s stateless constraint (and therefore self-description, as stateless is a sub-constraint). This is because the constraint is defined as;

[…] each request from client to server must contain all of the information necessary to understand the request, and cannot take advantage of any stored context on the server

And this leads us to look at a sample document, a JSON-LD document with an @context declaration as a message, and how we determine what that message means. Using the example from the front of the JSON-LD site;

{
  "@context": "http://json-ld.org/contexts/person.jsonld",
  "@id": "http://dbpedia.org/resource/John_Lennon",
  "name": "John Lennon",
  "born": "1940-10-09",
  "spouse": "http://dbpedia.org/resource/Cynthia_Lennon"
}

… sending this to someone is intended to communicate a set of RDF triples, including this one, where the “name” string is supposed to expand to the full FOAF name property URI;

<http://dbpedia.org/resource/John_Lennon> <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/name> “John Lennon” .

So to even “understand” the request, we need to resolve the @context URI to receive additional information. Therefore, stateful, and also not self-descriptive. Another way to look at this is from an archivist POV. If I store that JSON-LD document away for 10 years, restore it, and try to understand it what it meant, can I? Obviously in this case you’d need for that resolved document to have not changed in ways which change the meaning of our JSON-LD document. For example, by not re-binding “name” to rdfs:label.