Unifying Business, Data, and Code

Chapter 14. Introducing JSON Unify

Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.

Vincent Van Gogh

In previous chapters, you saw the idea of a data product introduced in Chapter 4 come to life using JSON and JSON Schema. More specifically, given an example JSON dataset, which corresponds to the data facet of a data product, we used JSON Schema to describe the remaining three facets: structure, meaning, and context.

The attentive reader might have realized there is still one problem. According to Chapter 4, a data product “encapsulates both the data and its packaging into a single, self-contained object.” However, the data product we defined in Chapter 12 and Chapter 13 is not standalone. The data lives separately from the schema, without any connection between them, and the schema does not contain all the information itself; it mostly references other schemas in our schema registry that do contain the information.

The aim of this chapter is to give you a glimpse of how JSON Schema can be extended, once again, to fix this last set of concerns. Rather than something to use and deploy right now, consider this chapter to be a thought-provoking experiment about the future of data products using JSON Schema. The authors of this book are exploring these ideas under the JSON Unify name and hope to publish an open source specification and implementation in the future.

Introducing the Dataset Vocabulary

If the core problem is collocating schema and data, what about ...