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What Are Real JSON Schemas Like?

An Empirical Analysis of Structural Properties

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Advances in Conceptual Modeling (ER 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 11787))

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Abstract

Recently, the semantics of the JSON Schema format, a de-facto standard for JSON schema declarations, has been formalized. It turns out that JSON Schema is a surprisingly complex schema language based on an open document semantics. In this paper, we present a first empirical analysis of a curated collection of real-world JSON Schemas. Knowing what real JSON Schemas are like (to borrow from a title of a related study on DTDs) helps practitioners and researchers in making realistic assumptions when building tools for JSON Schema processing.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/json-schema-org.

  2. 2.

    https://github.com/json-schema-org/JSON-Schema-Test-Suite, as of July 2019.

  3. 3.

    www.schemastore.org/json.

  4. 4.

    While there are daily updates to this collection, our analysis can be reproduced, as the site is managed on GitHub at https://github.com/SchemaStore/schemastore.

  5. 5.

    The fact that not all files are available or can be processed matches the reports of earlier studies on XML and XML schema languages, e.g. [5].

  6. 6.

    https://github.com/miniHive/schemastore-analysis.

  7. 7.

    https://github.com/everit-org/json-schema (Java), https://www.npmjs.com/package/ajv-cli (command-line), https://github.com/Julian/jsonschema (Python).

  8. 8.

    https://github.com/SchemaStore/schemastore/commits/master/src/schemas/json/nodemon.json, currently in the version committed back in January 2019.

  9. 9.

    https://github.com/SchemaStore/schemastore/commits/master/src/schemas/json/asmdef.jsonf, currently in the version committed back in July 2018.

  10. 10.

    http://json.schemastore.org/avro-avsc.

  11. 11.

    http://json.schemastore.org/ansible-stable-2.5.

  12. 12.

    See https://github.com/SchemaStore/schemastore/commits/master/src/schemas/json/lsdlschema.json in the version of March 2018.

  13. 13.

    http://json.schemastore.org/jdt.

  14. 14.

    See footnote 16.

  15. 15.

    https://github.com/ebdrup/json-schema-benchmark/.

  16. 16.

    Google BigQuery allows for querying the GitHub open data collection, mostly non-forked projects with an open source license: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/.

References

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Acknowledgements

This project was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), grant #385808805. We thank Mohamed-Amine Baazizi, Dario Colazzo, Giorgio Ghelli, and Carlo Sartiani for their comprehensive EDBT tutorial [1]. We thank Meike Klettke and Uta Störl for their feedback, and Sebastian Sidortschuck for computing statistics on the JSON Schema Test Suite.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. OTH Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany

    Benjamin Maiwald, Benjamin Riedle & Stefanie Scherzinger

Authors
  1. Benjamin Maiwald
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  2. Benjamin Riedle
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  3. Stefanie Scherzinger
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Correspondence to Stefanie Scherzinger .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy

    Giancarlo Guizzardi

  2. Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

    Frederik Gailly

  3. Federal University of Southern Bahia, Salvador, Brazil

    Rita Suzana Pitangueira Maciel

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Maiwald, B., Riedle, B., Scherzinger, S. (2019). What Are Real JSON Schemas Like?. In: Guizzardi, G., Gailly, F., Suzana Pitangueira Maciel, R. (eds) Advances in Conceptual Modeling. ER 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11787. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34146-6_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34146-6_9

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-34145-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-34146-6

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