Schema Studio

Schema Studio is an open-source visual schema engineering platform for creating, editing, validating, organizing, reviewing, versioning, and publishing metadata schemas through an interactive graphical interface.

Developed as part of the SEPIA (Sample Essentials, Persistent Identifiers & Attributes) ecosystem at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie GmbH (HZB), Schema Studio supports the development of type-specific metadata models for research data infrastructures. It promotes FAIR metadata principles, reusable schema components, terminology integration, transparent schema lifecycles, and long-term interoperability.

Schema Studio enables metadata engineers to design complex schemas without manually editing large schema documents. Changes made in the visual workspace are transformed into standards-compliant schemas and can immediately be inspected through an integrated dynamic form preview.

The platform currently supports JSON Schema and provides:

• Visual creation and editing of JSON Schema and UI Schema documents
• Field configuration, ordering, nesting, and reusable schema structures
• Validation rules, required fields, constraints, and predefined values
• Scientific terminology and controlled-vocabulary integration
• Live and saved-schema form previews
• A schema registry for organizing and managing schema versions
• Schema lifecycle operations, including drafting, publication, versioning, and deprecation
• Schema normalization, validation, persistence, manifest generation, and export
• Light and dark application themes
• Docker-based deployment of the frontend and backend

Schema Studio integrates @hzb-rdm/dynamic-json-form-renderer 2.1.0, which is built on React JSONSchema Form (RJSF) v6. The integration provides standard RJSF callback contracts, read-only rendering, improved submission and schema-error handling, accessible validation feedback, and runtime color customization.

A renderer color selector allows users to apply one of 22 supported Tailwind CSS color families across live and saved-schema previews. Theme and color changes are applied immediately without requiring a page refresh.

Version 1.1.0 is a backward-compatible maintenance, quality-assurance, and compliance release. It introduces repository-wide pre-commit checks, automated frontend formatting with Prettier and the Tailwind CSS plugin, backend linting with Ruff, and REUSE-based licensing compliance.

Dedicated GitLab CI jobs now verify formatting, licensing, and code-quality requirements before container images are built. The release also improves the Docker and GitLab CI configurations used to build development, production, and version-tagged container images.

The development and build environment has been standardized on Node.js 22 and pnpm 11.17.0. Dependency installation, lockfile validation, approved dependency build scripts, and access to packages hosted in the Helmholtz GitLab package registry have also been improved.

This release focuses on reproducibility, maintainability, licensing transparency, and release-pipeline reliability. It does not introduce breaking changes to the schema-authoring workflow or exported schema format.

The frontend uses React, Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, and pnpm. The backend provides modular Python services for parsing, normalization, schema storage, registry management, manifest generation, and export.

Schema Studio is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

Source code: https://codebase.helmholtz.cloud/hzb/research_data_management/schema-studio
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21486685