I'm as new as can be to JSON. I understand that both JSON-LD and JSON Schema are used to validate JSON data. I, however, cannot find much information comparing and contrasting the two.
Which one is better?
Why use one over the other?
Advantages vs disadvantages?
Can these two even be compared?
Am I misunderstanding what JSON-LD and JSON Schema are?
JSON-LD's goal is to make JSON documents understandable by machines by linking it to well-defined vocabularies. It is not used to validate JSON data. JSON Schema is used for that purpose though. So you can't really compare the two.
Am I misunderstanding what JSON-LD and JSON Schema are?
About JSON-LD, yes; In JSON-LD document, JSON-LD is defined as:
a JSON-based format to serialize Linked Data
Can these two even be compared?
It would be better to compare JSON-LD with JSON (not JSON Schema). Or you could compare JSON Schema with the other encoding syntax schemas e.g. XML Schema.
Note: The following section is about the remaining questions (considering the difference between JSON-LD and JSON).
Choosing between JSON and JSON-LD depends on the situation and context of use. Generally, JSON is a markup language in the syntactic level where the data encoded is just machine-readable. But JSON-LD is being used to semantically markup the data, to make them become not only machine-readable, but also machine-understanable by providing additional syntax to JSON for serialization of Linked Data.
Recommended resource to understand the detailed differences between JSON-LD and JSON is the JSON-LD document published by W3C.
