Hasn't that been done? Efforts like Amazon's Ion come to mind, or Google's Protocol Buffers & FlatBuffers. http://amzn.github.io/ion-docs/ http://amzn.github.i

Hasn't that been done? Efforts like Amazon's Ion come to mind, or Google's Protocol Buffers & FlatBuffers. http://amzn.github.io/ion-docs/ http://amzn.github.io/ion-docs/ https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers https://google.github.io/flatbuffers/ https://google.github.io/flatbuffers/ ProtoBuf requires a schema for the document to be known ahead of time and involves deserialization; Ion is more like JSON in that it's self-describing, but has a rich set of data types as well as annotations on fields to further describe meaning. FlatBuffers requires a schema and provides access to the without parsing/unpacking. On the other hand, if you're building a service and specifying its interface, rather than just specifying a data format, then there are tools like Smithy, gRPC, and Thrift. https://github.com/awslabs/smithy https://github.com/awslabs/smithy https://grpc.io/ https://grpc.io/ https://thrift.apache.org/ https://thrift.apache.org/