Status: Descriptive - Draft
The IPLD Data Model is a core part of the IPLD specification, which describes what data is representable in IPLD -- for example, booleans, integers, textual strings, maps and lists, etc.
While the Data Model describes these representations in the abstract, Codecs specify exactly how these data are transcribed into serialized bytes. (Another component of the IPLD specifications, Schemas, provide additional optional tooling on top of the Data Model which can further refine, describe, and constrain the range of acceptable data values.)
There is not one block format but many block formats widely used today in content addressed data structures. We assume that we'll see more of these block formats in the future and not less. It is quite clear then that a reasonable and more future proof approach to using these data structures is to be block format agnostic.
The data model defines a common respresentation of basic types that are easily representable by common programming languages. This provides the foundation for block format agnostic tools to be built using familiar native types in a programmer's preferred language. As such, there is an element of "lowest common denominator" to the IPLD Data Model in that it cannot support some advanced features (like non-string keys for Maps) because support for such a feature is not common enough among programming languages.
This does not mean that a block format could not support more advanced features than exist in the data model, it just means that the common set of tools IPLD is building w/ its block format agnostic approach cannot be easily leveraged to use those features.
The following is the list of essential kinds (or more formally, representation kinds) of data representable in the IPLD Data Model:
- Null
- Boolean
- Integer
- Float
- String
- Bytes
- List
- Map
- Link
(Note that we use the term "kinds" here to disambiguate this from "types", which is a term we'll use at the Schemas level.)
The recursive kinds are:
- List
- Map
The scalar kinds (the complement of recursive) are:
- Null
- Boolean
- Integer
- Float
- String
- Bytes
- Link
(Note that Schemas introduce a few more kinds -- when clarification is necessary, these Data Model kinds can be called the "representation kinds", while the additional kinds introduced in the Schema layer are "perceived kinds".)
Each of the following sections provides details about each of the kinds introduced in the summary table above.
Null is a scalar kind. Its cardinality is one -- the only value is 'null'.
Boolean is a scalar kind. Its cardinality is two -- either the value 'true' or the value 'false'.
String is a scalar kind. Its cardinality is infinite -- strings do not have a length limit.
Strings should be UTF-8 text, in NFC canonicalization.
Bytes is a scalar kind. Its cardinality is infinite -- byte sequences do not have a length limit.
Bytes are distinct from strings in that they are not considered to have any character encoding nor generally expected to be printable as human-readable text. In order to print byte sequences as text, additional effort such as Base64 encoding may be required.
List is a recursive kind.
Values contained in lists can be accessed by their ordinal offset in the list.
Map is a recursive kind.
Values in maps are accessed by their "key". Maps can also be iterated over, yielding key+value pairs.
A link represents a link to another IPLD Block. The link reference
is a CID.
Link is a scalar kind -- however, when "loaded", may become another kind, either scalar or recursive!