About datamodels

The purpose of the data model is to abstract away the peculiarities of the underlying file format. The same data model may be used for data created from scratch in memory, or loaded from ASDF files or some future file format.

Each model instance is created to contain a variety of attributes and data that are needed for analysis or to propagate information about the file and the contents of the file. For example, the roman_datamodels.datamodels.ImageModel class has the following arrays associated with it:

• data: The science data

• dq: The data quality array

• err: The error array

Along with data arrays the datamodel also contains information about the observation that can include the observation program, exposure information, pointing information and processing steps.