Flattening

The process of flattening gathers together all of the properties of a single node under a single dictionary in the output document. It also ensures that all blank nodes are labelled with a blank node identifier. A flattened document is a lot easier to process in certain applications (especially where mapping to RDF triples is desired). For more information please refer to the JSON-LD API Specification.

The Flattening operation is implemented by the static method JsonLdProcessor.Flatten(). The method accepts the following parameters:

• input - the JSON-LD document to be flattened. This parameter may be either a Newtonsoft.Json.Linq.JObject representing the parsed JSON-LD document, or a Newtonsoft.Json.Linq.JValue with a string value which is the URI of the JSON-LD document to be retrieved and processed.
• context - this optional parameter specifies a context to use to compact the flattened document. This parameter can be either null (in which case no compaction is performed) or one of the following values:
  • A Newtonsoft.Json.Linq.JObject representing a parsed JSON-LD context
  • A Newtonsoft.Json.Linq.JValue with a string value which is the URI of the JSON-LD document to retrieve and parse
  • A Newtonsoft.Json.Linq.JArray of Newtonsoft.Json.Linq.JObject or Newtonsoft.Json.Linq.JValue items which represents a collection of contexts to be combined and applied to the flattened output
• options - a JsonLdProcessorOptions providing the options for the flatten and compaction (if required) operations.