JSON is a JavaScript child with all its pains and mistakes, and with one of the biggest ones of not looking into what's going on other platforms. There was gre

JSON is a JavaScript child with all its pains and mistakes, and with one of the biggest ones of not looking into what's going on other platforms. There was great work done by OASIS to look into all aspects of meta-modelling and data warehousing, that resulted in specs like MOF and UML2. I'd say that every modern DOM or other object metamodel must be based on these specs (or have some sensible mapping like the one done by Eclipse EMF project for XML schema to Ecore). What's good in MOF is that it easy to map it to programming language metamodels (for example, you can map MOF model to Java Reflection API). Another option, if you don't need to design it from scratch, is just to use XML schema: JSON is basically a representation of DOM. In Java you can even use the same API to serialize both to JSON and to XML, which means that they both can be described by the same model language. If someone doesn't like XML schema syntax, it's probably possible to load XML Schema XSD into DOM and then serialize it to JSON - voila, you have JSON schema.