SpatialData is an open and interoperable data framework for spatial omics data. This repository specifies it in plain English, independently of any implementation. This branch only points to the others:
| Branch | What it holds | Releases |
|---|---|---|
data-model |
the abstract data model: what a SpatialData dataset is | tags data-model-<version> |
storage-format |
the storage format: how a dataset is stored (Zarr, Parquet, built on OME-NGFF); each version encodes one data model version | tags storage-format-<version> |
maintenance/storage-format-<version> |
older storage format versions, with the corrections made since their release | |
rfcs |
the RFCs: proposals for large changes of the data model or the storage format | |
site |
the website, which builds them together, and the pages of the project: landing page, contributing guide |
data-model and storage-format each hold the current version of their part, with the
corrections made since its release; the tags keep the text as first released. The in-memory
formats are specified in the repositories of the implementations.
Pull requests go against data-model, storage-format, rfcs or site, not against this branch; how
to contribute is in the contributing guide on the website (site/contributing.md on the branch
site).
History. Until October 2026 the specification was written with all storage format versions side
by side, first on the branch history-draft, then on this branch, and written to the branches above
by tools/write_history.py and tools/split_branches.py. That history is kept here.
The specification text is licensed under CC-BY-4.0, the website code under BSD-3-Clause (see the
LICENSE files of the branches).