def-au-schema-json

ANSIS JSON Schema

Documentation of the ANSIS JSON Schema, including tables summarising each schema object is here:

• https://anzsoildata.github.io/def-au-schema-json/docs/ansis-schema

Navigating this repository

This repository is broken into four folders:

1. The schema folder holds the collections of ANSIS schema.
2. The data folder holds example JSON documents (e.g. an example SoilSite).
3. The docs folder holds documentation of the schema.
4. The figs folder holds images used by documents elsewhere in the repository.

Overview

This repository holds JSON Schema developed for the Australian National Soil Information System (ANSIS). The authoritative ANSIS information model has been developed as an OWL/RDF ontology, also published in this GitHub organisation at ANZSoilData/def-au-domain. These schema are a representation of that ontology. They do not introduce new domain entities or properties, and all definitions are taken from def-au-domain. They are created to support JSON representations of data suitable for use in ‘typical’ web APIs and for processing by widely used programming libraries. As such they remove some OWL/RDF artefacts necessary for the definition of a robust ontology but not commonly required for JSON objects; they also remove some of the choices available in the ontology that can lead to recursion in a JSON document.

* These artifacts reflect the fundamental importance of set theory and reasoning to OWL/RDF. We anticipate that future versions ANSIS will provide Semantic Web APIs that support reasoning and inferencing. The JSON schema and RDF approaches should therefore be considered complimentary.

Several collections of schema will be provided:

• The domain schema represents the full ANSIS information model as structured data (i.e. related complex objects). ANSIS data providers should refer to this schema for guidance on what data ANSIS may require for all of its use cases.
• Additional ‘application schema’ will define subsets of the domain schema for particular use cases. These may denormalise the data for certain data types - e.g. GIS Layers or spreadsheets. ANSIS data providers should use these schema for guidance on supporting a specific ANSIS use case.

The principles guiding the design of the schema are documented here.

Contributing

Please raise any bugs this repository’s Issues log. If you are not sure it is a real issue you can raise your concerns in the Discussions log.

Non-ANSIS project members can contact Peter Wilson.

When providing feedback or raising issues, please note the relationship between the JSON schema and the domain ontology:

1. Contributions concerning the definitions of entities, properties and enumerations (vocabularies) relate to the domain ontology and should be made in the context of the domain ontology.
2. Contributions concerning the use of JSON Schema and using documents generated to conform to these scheme should be made in this context.

We urge contributors to be familiar with the domain ontology, JSON Schema and the JSON Schema Specification.

This work currently uses draft/2020-12 of the JSON Schema specification.

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