Why are value objects ineligible to be type map values?

[nyarly]

I am guessing that the answer is related to #77 and that a type map is using node object @type as keys, rather than value object @types.

My use case is this: I would like to attach skos:notation values to my resources. Because skos:notation uses locally coined datatypes to distinguish the context of the notation, I would like to be tagging the @type into these values. This is simple enough in the case of a single notation: just use type coercion on a term like nickname or reference. However, if I want to use different notations for different kinds of resources, or using multiple notations on a single resource, the coercion becomes more complex.

Instead, I would like to use a type map to briefly tag the notation, and perhaps provide "coordinates" in the form of multiple notations. The JSON playground makes this look like it almost works:

 {
  "@context": {
    "skos": "http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#",
    "ex": "http://www.example.com/vocab/",
    "recordId": "ex:recordId",
    "nick": {
      "@id": "skos:notation",
      "@container": "@type"
    }
  },
  
  "nick": {
    "recordId": 17
  } 
}

Playground link

I note that the expanded version has an array for @type however, which I understand is not allowed for a value object.

[gkellogg]

From the definition of Type Maps, they are designed specifically for node objects, not value objects. This would have been discussed at the time. Supporting type maps for value objects would be an enhancement, but we'd need to re-consider the contemporaneous discussions to see why this was not pursued before. The discussions should all be in https://json-ld.org/minutes/ somewhere and in the issues and pull requests in the various repositories.

[nyarly]

Got it. I'll see what I can find in the minutes. I think I caught discussion as I was trying to figure this out that made it sound like this was a consequence of using @type as the name - that there's a confusion between it being an RDFa style type vs a scalar datatype.