Is there a restriction in WP on the use of jQuery load function?

You should always use a full URI when specifying a location of a resource (in this case a file). With relative URIs like you use for you data file here, the URI will be appended to the URL in the address bar which will result in surprising URLs when you use permalinks.

In practice the pattern for developing such thing is to upload the files via the admin and use the URL you get via the attachment API. This way you do not need to assume anything about which part of the server are accessible to the user.
If it is part of a theme, then you do know where it i located, just use the proper theme api to get the theme’s root url.