Discovering implicit schemas in JSON data

Abstract

JSON has become a very popular lightweigth format for data exchange. JSON is human readable and easy for computers to parse and use. However, JSON is schemaless. Though this brings some benefits (e.g., flexibility in the representation of the data) it can become a problem when consuming and integrating data from different JSON services since developers need to be aware of the structure of the schemaless data. We believe that a mechanism to discover (and visualize) the implicit schema of the JSON data would largely facilitate the creation and usage of JSON services. For instance, this would help developers to understand the links between a set of services belonging to the same domain or API. In this sense, we propose a model-based approach to generate the underlying schema of a set of JSON documents. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.