Json-LD > Define a “person” for easy reuse as valu

I am trying to use json-ld on my website using schema.org as the lanquage.

The reason is to assist search engine's crawlers to understand my site.

Schema.org offers many key/value attribute pairs for Types of Items.

Sometimes the values for those keys are themselves an Item with their own Type and have their own set of key/value pairs.

In practice, the same Item is appropriate answer for several different keys, and it is desirous/necessary to give that Item's key/value set.

In my case, for example, I am marking up a web pages on a website with schema.org's "WebPage" type.

I want to give the same person as the answer for various keys on the WebPage type: author, creator, copyrightHolder, etc.

I think I can do this repeating the values each time with something like:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
    "@context": "http://schema.org",
    "@type" : "WebPage",
    "name" : "The Name of the Webpage",
    "author" : 
        {
        "@type" : "Person",
        "name" : "Tim"
        }
    "creator": 
        {
        "@type" : "Person",
        "name" : "Tim"
        }
    "copyrightHolder" :
        {
        "@type" : "Person"
        "name" : "Tim",
        }
}
</script>

However, that is repetitive and verbose to me.

I would rather assign/define the person once, and then reference him (me) using a keyword as needed.

I don't know much about json-ld or coding/programming, and as a lay person I have found the information (spec + jsonld.org + here) a bit confusing.

I understand that @context can be expanded for the document (here a webpage) to define 'things' in addition to declaring the relevant 'language' as being schema.or, and that json-ld also seems to support referencing specific items using 'IRIs' as an ID.

So it seems like I might be able to define the Person once as desired with something similar to the following:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
    "@context": 
        ["http://schema.org",
            {
              "Tim" : 
                {
                "@type" : "Person",
                "@id" : "https://www.example.com/tim#tim"
                "name" : "Tim"
                }
            }],
    "@type" : "WebPage",
    "name" : "The Name of the Webpage",
    "author" : "Tim",
    "creator": "Tim"
}
</script>

So my questions are:

Can we do this and, if so, how?
In a lot of documentation, IRI's appear to be URLs with #value tacked on the end. Is the #value simply a declaration to differentiate it from the page URL (which may be a value unto itself for some other keys), or is the #value referencing a div on the page such as a div with an id="value" or perhaps some other protocol?
If I do this, will say Google's crawler simply cache the IRI for referencing later of the associated URL or div, or will it likely assign the values defined? Ideally, I would like the expanded values to be returned for each use.

I have looked a lot on this site for answers to these questions. I have seen similar questions and answers, and which may have answered these questions but in a way I could not understand. For example, I do not know what a "node" or an "object" is.

Please excuse my lack of knowledge. Any use of simple plain language would be appreciated. Actually, any help would be much appreciated!

Thank you.

Your example is almost right. You need to assign an @id to the person object that you reuse elsewhere:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
    "@context": "http://schema.org",
    "@type" : "WebPage",
    "name" : "The Name of the Webpage",
    "author" : {
      "@type" : "Person",
      "@id": "#tim",
      "name" : "Tim"
    },
    "creator": {
      "@id": "#tim"
    },
    "copyrightHolder": {
      "@id": "#tim"
    }
}
</script>