its structure, is impossible without a very deep prior understanding of the specific XML implementation, along with assistance by software that understands the XML schema that has been employed. Such text is not "human-understandable" any more than a book written in Swahili (which uses the Latin alphabet) would be to an American or Western European who does not know a word of that language: the tags are symbols that are meaningless to a person unfamiliar with the domain. JSON JSON or JavaScript Object Notation, is an open standard format that uses human-readable text to transmit data objects consisting of attribute–value pairs. It is used primarily to transmit data between a server and web application, as an alternative to XML. JSON has been popularized by web services developed utilizing REST principles. There is a new breed of databases such as MongoDB and Couchbase that store data natively in JSON format, leveraging the pros of semi-structured data architecture. Pros and cons Advantages Programmers persisting objects from their application to a database do not need to worry about object-relational impedance mismatch, but can often serialize objects via a light-weight library. Support for nested or hierarchical data often simplifies data models representing complex relationships between entities. Support for lists of objects simplifies data models by avoiding messy translations of lists into a relational data model. Disadvantages The traditional relational data model has a popular and ready-made query language, SQL. Prone to "garbage in, garbage out"; by removing restraints from the data model, there is less fore-thought that is necessary to operate a data application. See also Semi-structured model NoSQL Unstructured data Structured data References External links UPenn Database Group semi-structured data and XML Semi-Structured data analytics: Relational or Hadoop platform? by IBM Data modeling