orc

Orchestrate the production, validation, and indexing of the YAML truth source for allometric/models. orc ingests publication and model family YAML files and validates them against a declared schema. YAMLs are compiled into a set of parquet files, used to distribute models in a queryable format.

Of paramount importance for model development are the publication and model family schema specifications, which can be viewed at the documentation site below.

Documentation: https://allometric.org/orc/

Install

python3 -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install -e ".[dev]"

Activate the environment so orc is on your PATH:

source .venv/bin/activate

(Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate.) Verify the install:

orc --help

Once activated, orc runs from anywhere — no need to prefix .venv/bin/. To leave the environment, run deactivate.

Usage

orc is typically used when sitting inside a checkout of the allometric/models repo, but it can also be run from any directory with a path to the models repo or a single model YAML file.

cd path/to/allometric/models
orc ingest

Or be explicit:

orc ingest path/to/allometric/models/publications
orc ingest path/to/a/single.yaml

Exit code is 0 when every model validates, 1 if any errors are found. Add --parquet dir to also write the compiled records as six flat parquet tables — publications, models, model_specs, and the family tables families, family_blobs, family_members — joined on pub_id / id / set_id / model_id / family_id, using DuckDB as the writer (no pyarrow dependency). Null-only columns stay properly typed, and empty tables still produce a zero-row, correctly typed parquet file:

orc ingest --parquet out/

Warnings (e.g. content-identical models across publications) are printed but do not fail the run.

More

• The YAML schema, model kinds, and identifier scheme are documented at https://allometric.org/orc/ (docs/ in this repo).
• TODO.md and model_families_plan.md track upcoming work.