JSON-LD is a way to represent linked data in JSON. It provides a mechanism to reduce the verbosity of the result by a context that authors can use to give short names for URIs in the data.

JSON-LD is intended for environments and contexts (in the sense of this paper) in which JSON is already in use and there’s a need to add support for linked data using the RDF data model, perhaps to support graph-based query languages.

Although JSON-LD combines the advantages of both JSON and RDF, it also inherits many of their disadvantages: the underlying data model of RDF is not extended to include the source of triplets, and mixed content is still not directly supported.