Review of format for linguistic object content using a custom formatting syntax

[beaudet]

In our TMS data, surrounding underscores _ are used to indicate italics. surrounding asterisks * are used to indicate bold. That's it. There doesn't seem to be a standard format that captures this. Maybe it's a subset of a larger standardized format, but I could not locate it. For example, here in github, both * and _ seem to indicate italics.

So, I've expanded on the markdown format to include the specific formatters. Is this reasonable / sufficient? Any better ideas? Removal of all formatting isn't an option.

When no formatters are present in the text, the format just becomes text/plain.

        {
            "type": "LinguisticObject",
            "classified_as": [
                {
                    "id": "http://vocab.getty.edu/aat/300435419",
                    "type": "Type",
                    "_label": "bibliography"
                }
            ],
            "content": "Goldberg, Jim. _Raised by Wolves_. Zurich, 1995: 167.",
            "format": "text/markdown; formatting=\"_italics_, *bold*\"",
            "used_for": [
                {
                    "type": "Activity",
                    "classified_as": [
                        {
                            "id": "http://vocab.getty.edu/aat/300054686",
                            "type": "Type",
                            "_label": "publishing"
                        }
                    ],
                    "timespan": {
                        "type": "TimeSpan",
                        "begin_of_the_begin": "1995-01-01T00:00:00Z",
                        "end_of_the_begin": "1995-12-31T23:59:59Z",
                        "begin_of_the_end": "1995-01-01T00:00:00Z",
                        "end_of_the_end": "1995-12-31T23:59:59Z"
                    }
                }
            ]
        },

[beaudet]

Daniel suggested pre-processing this to convert it to markdown which makes sense to me.