If true, references to objects in fields will be reified and validated. If false, they won’t, but an :info level fault report will be generated.

There are several things in the spec which, in a document, may correctly be either

1. a fully fleshed out object, or
2. a URI pointing to such an object.

Obviously to fully validate a document we ought to reify all the refs and check that they are themselves valid, but

a. in some of the published test documents the URIs do not reference a valid document; b. there will be performance costs to reifying all the refs; c. in perverse cases, reifying refs might result in runaway recursion.

TODO: I think that in production this should default to true.

The severity at which the binary validator will return false.

In practice documents seen in the wild do not typically appear to be fully valid, and this does not matter. This allows the sensitivity of the binary validator (dog-and-duck.quack.quack) to be tuned. It’s in this (dog-and-duck.quack.picky) namespace, not that one, because this namespace is where concerns about severity are handled.