Overview of stdatamodels

stdatamodels is a Python package that provides a framework for defining, creating, loading, and manipulating data models for astronomical data. It is designed to work with data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). stdatamodels is maintained by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI).

The purpose of the data model is to abstract away the peculiarities of the underlying file format. A data model may be created from scratch in memory, or loaded from a file in FITS or ASDF format. The datamodel provides a consistent interface to the data and metadata, regardless of the way it was created.

The jwst data processing pipeline makes extensive use of stdatamodels to represent the data at various stages of processing. However, stdatamodels remains a standalone package to allow the use of JWST data products without needing to install the entire JWST pipeline infrastructure.

Please note that stdatamodels is not intended to be a general-purpose FITS or ASDF file reader/writer. The available data model schemas correspond to specific file formats generated or expected by the JWST pipeline.