Introduction

VO-DML is defined formally in an IVOA Standard, however, this guide is intended to offer practical assistance to those who want to use VO-DML to create data models, and then create code that can serialize those models to various formats.

The purpose of writing data models is two-fold

• It defines concepts for a particular domain in an abstract way that provides a common discourse about meanings within that domain.
• It provides a machine-readable representation that can be transformed in various ways that allow instances of the model to be transported, stored and queried.

Start Modelling and learn about model design

Features of VO-DML tooling

• easy to install - create a dependency on this project rather than checking it out see template
• model validation
• auto-generation of XML, JSON and TAP Schema
• auto-generation of Java and Python code that serializes to these schema.