An Empirical Study on the “Usage of Not” in Real-World JSON Schema Documents

We study the usage of negation in JSON Schema data modeling. Negation is a logical operator rarely present in type systems and schema description languages, since it complicates decision problems: many software tools, but also formal frameworks for working with JSON Schema, do not fully support negation. This motivates us to study whether negation is actually used in practice, for which aims, and whether it could—in principle—be replaced by simpler operators. We have collected a large corpus of 80k open source JSON Schema documents from GitHub. We perform a systematic analysis, quantify usage patterns of negation, and also qualitatively analyze schemas. We show that negation is indeed used, albeit infrequently, following a stable set of patterns.