Kiln Data Model

How Kiln projects are structured

Understanding the Kiln Data Model

Kiln projects are simply a directory of files (mostly JSON files with the extension .kiln) that describe your project, including tasks, runs, ratings, fine-tunes and other data.

This dataset design was chosen for several reasons:

• Git compatibility: Kiln project folders are easy to collaborate on with Git (or a shared drive). See our collaboration guide for additional details of how we avoid conflicts and format to support diff tools.

• JSON allows you to easily load and manipulate the data using standard tools (pandas, polars, etc.).

Data Model Overview

Here's a high level overview of the Kiln datamodel. A project folder will reflect this nested structure:

• Project: a Kiln Project that contains related tasks.

  • Task: a specific task including prompt instructions, input/output schemas, and requirements.

    • TaskRun: a sample (run) of a task including input, output, and human rating information.

    • Finetune: a model for fine-tuning jobs. Includes configuration, status tracking, and data necessary to call the deployed fine-tuned model.

    • Prompts: a custom prompt for this task. See our prompts docs for details.

    • DatasetSplit: a frozen collection of task runs divided into train/test/validation splits.

See the python library datamodel docs for detailed descriptions of classes, fields and validations.

Python Library

If you want to access the data model via code, check out our python library. The library offers iterators, typed classes, pydantic validation, and more. It's the easiest way to read and mutate a Kiln dataset.

Direct Access

You can load Kiln project files using any tool which supports JSON, including polars and pandas. See the example in our library docs.

We highly recommend the Kiln python library for any writes to .kiln files. It will run validators which catch issues which could break your project.