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Welcome to the NOMAD documentation for nomad-simulations, a schema for computational materials science data.

Where to Start

The documentation is split into three complementary sections:

• Schema Navigation > Overview: auto-generated reference for section trees, quantities, inheritance, and relationship diagrams.
• Schema Explanation > Overview: hand-written guidance for understanding the existing schema, its concepts, and its usage patterns.
• Schema Development > Overview: published technical guidance for schema extenders, parser authors, and contributors implementing schema behavior.

Context

NOMAD is an open-source research data management platform developed by the NFDI consortium FAIRmat. For broader platform documentation, see the NOMAD docs and NOMAD base sections guide.

The nomad-simulations schema provides reusable core sections that can be extended for code-specific and domain-specific schemas while preserving consistent structure, interoperability, and discoverability.

When designing sections, we follow established object-oriented design principles and patterns (for example, SOLID and Design Patterns by Gamma et al.).

Throughout this documentation, we use UML class diagrams to represent schema relationships. UML is specified by the Object Management Group (OMG).

Contributing

If you want to contribute schema or documentation updates:

1. Fork the repository and create a focused branch.
2. Check Schema Development > Overview before changing established patterns.
3. Implement your extension following the Schema Development Guide.
4. Update docs according to the Documentation Writing Guide.
5. Open a pull request against upstream with a clear scope and test evidence.