GRDDLing JSON?

I'm rather out of the loop, so apologies if something like this has already
been discussed, implemented even. But I feel obliged to flag an
issue, offer a potential solution (which might already exist).

# Use case :
For the past few days I've been working on a bit of code where a processing
pipeline will be set up declaratively. I'm still on baby steps, but it's a
place where RDF should be ideal. A little graph defines the nodes & arcs of
the processing system.

To get the code started, I only need a trivial model to work from. A simple
list, (input reader)->(process)-> (output writer).
So at this stage, it seemed reasonable just to use a minimal JSON list.
Generalise to RDF later.
There's a sequence of nodes, each with an instance ID and a type for the
nature of the thing.
A very simple JSON structure covers it.

# Issue :
But looking ahead, I wondered how to migrate from the arbitrary JSON to an
RDF model. Obviously, JSON-LD.
In my head I saw a namespace declaration, the rest just lifted & placed
there from the keys in the JSON mappings. But in practice, it's not quite
like that, it gets ugly fast.
I guess it's basically a syntax issue.
What you see in the (arbitrary) JSON expression is visually/intuitively
understandable. Ditto in Turtle. But in JSON-LD, any kind, the immediacy of
interpretation by a human (this one at least)  is lost.

# Proposed Solution :
I don't know if anyone remembers GRDDL [1]. An elegant approach for
bridging between anyXML and RDF.  One added attribute in the doc, to say it
has an RDF representation and here's how to get it. It's an easy inclusion
in namespaced XML, we* went for XSLT transformers, a very immediate
approach. Imagine an org with loads of XML documents of the same shape. A
transformation has to be written once, that pointer inserted in all these
docs, very low-effort mapping to the RDF world.
As far as I'm aware, to date, absolutely no-one has ever used this.

*But* the idea is great. Forget XML, let's do JSON.
Add one (presumably top-level) name value pair in a JSON doc:

{ "http://www.w3.org/2003/g/data-view#", "http://example.org/this-to-that"
...
}

At http://example.org/this-to-that you have the definition of how to take
this arbitrary JSON and make it a citizen of the Web.

I'll say again, you might well just want to bin this if such things have
been dealt with already.
But it did strike me that in practice, I was facing horrible stuff to look
at. Please remember RDF/XML's role in adoption.

Cheers,
Danny.

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/grddl/

* yeah, I was on the GRDDL Working Group. Memory totally gone over my
contributions, but in these things I generally only offer /wrong/ arguments
(realise years later), which post-factum I convince myself are useful to
get the people with their heads screwed on to look at things more closely.
I'm still a little irritated I didn't get a credit in the doc, I poked Dan
Connolly and he said he's sort it, Didn't. It did mean something to me, one
of the very few things I've been involved with which had a very pleasing
end product (even if absolutely no-one uses it).

I should also confess I was mouthy in the JSON-LD group at the start, but
quietly shuffled away when I realised the other folks had magnitudes better
grasp.

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https://hyperdata.it <http://hyperdata.it/danja>