Resolving vocabulary URIs?

Hi,

I am new to the list, so my apologies if this has been covered earlier, or
elsewhere. I couldn't find an answer, in any case.

The context of a document references the URI of one or more vocabularies.
My understanding is that this whole idea of linked data allows the web to
be machine readable by smart clients, however I'm generally seeing that the
referenced vocabulary URIs (schema.org in particular) just go to the site's
home page, which is not machine readable in any standardized way. So, given
that most types ultimately drill down to basic data types (string, date,
integer, etc.) I have assumed that I would be able to look at a JSON-LD
document and "follow the trail" back to machine-readable sources that would
give me enough standardized information that I can then generate an
appropriate representation, without technically having had to know anything
about that vocabulary in advance. Is this the idea, but which has yet to be
realised? I'm trying to build a small sample reference client using JSON-LD
and Hydra, and the lack of machine-readability in the response from a
vocabulary URI is making me think I have to decide what vocabularies I want
to support and maintain a copy of each on my own server, such that the
client can look there instead for the exact definitions of each type.

Any guidance on this would be appreciated.

thanks,
Nathan Ridley

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