What is the best way to represent data with inheritance?

Question

In my current work, we need to serialize some data and use it later. Our data is in this format:

<resources>
<style name="Person">
    <item name="name">name</item>
    <item name="age">32</item>
</style>
<style name="Student" parent="Person">
        <item name="course">course</item>
</style>
</resources>

We need to parse these data frequently.

Can we do something similar in json? Apart from xml and json, is there any other data structure to support inheritance better? And what is the best way to parse this parent-child relationship data?

Update:

I like the idea of @Ipad1gs. I just wanted to clear few more things in xml, we can extend this to and even we can override things like the name.

<resources>
    <style name="Person">
        <item name="name">name</item>
        <item name="age">32</item>
    </style>
    <style name="Student" parent="Person">
            <item name="course">course</item>
    </style>
<style name="Employee" parent="Person">
          <item name="name">employee name</item>
            <item name="department">department</item>
    </style>
    </resources>

How can we do the similar thing in json using composition?

Answer 1

I suggest not using inheritance, but composition, eg:in json:

Here is a "Person"

{
  "name":"name",
  "age":32
}

Here is a "Student", which holds a "Person" instead of becoming a "Person":

{
    "course":"name"
    "person":{
      "name":"name",
      "age":32
    }
}