Conal, thanks for explaining. The items are indeed not linked. Indeed, the current format hides the fact that they are items altogether. Perhaps this is going a step too far, and it is better to take an approach similar to that of Hay: still have a dedicated wikibase-item data type for which the value includes the id, but also the label. What are your thoughts on using this approach [0]? (Everyone is welcome to comment on this.) As you can see, it makes the format significantly more verbose and is not quite as trivial to use when you don't care about the links or ids. It's still a lot simpler than dealing with the canonical Wikibase item format, and perhaps strikes a better balance than what I created initially.
> And if the data serialization is JSON, why not use JSON-LD which is
> all the rage these days? http://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld/
Thanks for the suggestion. I'm not really familiar with JSON-LD and quickly read through the examples there. While this is certainly interesting, I wonder what the actual benefits are, going on the assumption that most developers are unfamiliar with this format. It does add complexity, so I'm quite hesitant to use this in the main format. That said, this might be a good candidate for an additional response format. (And adding additional formats to the API in a clean way ought to be quite easy, see https://github.com/JeroenDeDauw/QueryrAPI/issues/39)