The NIEM JSON Specification establishes the technical basis for using JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) as a data format for exchange of information consistent with NIEM-conformant schemas and information exchange package documentations (IEPDs).
NIEM-conformance of JSON data is primarily focused on the relationship between the data in the JSON file and the definitions established by a NIEM-conformant schema, e.g., the schema defined by a NIEM IEPD. There are two forms of conformance of a NIEM JSON document to a NIEM-conformant schema:
Strict conformance establishes that the JSON instance follows all rules of the schema or IEPD. An instance that strictly conforms to an IEPD will contain all content that is required by the IEPD, will contain only content allowed by the IEPD, and will reflect the parent-child structure and cardinality constraints defined by the IEPD. This enables NIEM JSON to satisfy exchange requirements similar to traditional NIEM XML use cases.
Lax conformance enables the use of vocabularies that are defined by NIEM schemas or IEPDs via linked data and linked open data methods. It establishes that exchanges with NIEM-conformant vocabularies use those vocabularies properly; this allows data to be more flexible, and to combine terms from NIEM-conformant vocabularies with terms from other vocabularies.
Please submit comments on this specification as issues at https://github.com/NIEM/NIEM-JSON-Spec/issues.
This document is tracked in version control at https://github.com/NIEM/NIEM-JSON-Spec. This version is tagged in GitHub at https://github.com/NIEM/NIEM-JSON-Spec/releases/tag/v5.0.