Official Documentation
Where is the Official Documentation?
The official documentation for the meaning of each table, each column and their data type is here. The data types are Oracle SQL data types.
How useful is the Official Documentation?
Sometimes the explanations in AEMO's documentation are useful. For example, the definition of UIGF in DISPATCHREGIONSUM is
"Regional aggregated Unconstrained Intermittent Generation Forecast of Semi-scheduled generation (MW)".
(Unconstrained means that AEMO is not telling wind and solar generators to turn down and 'spill' wind/sunshine.
Semi-scheduled is what most wind and solar are. AEMO tells them what to generate, but it is only an upper limit. In contrast coal and gas are scheduled. They cannot generate less or more power than they are told.)
Some documentation is not useful. For example in table DISPATCHREGIONSUM the column EXCESSGENERATION is defined as
"MW quantity of excess".
What is "excess" energy?
Is that when a solar/wind generator exceeds its UIGF forecast?
Is it when a generators exceeds its dispatch target?
Is it the net or gross export for the region?
The writers of this schema documentation make strong assumptions about the reader's background knowledge.
Additional limitations of AEMO's documentation are described here
Other Documentation
This site includes an improved copy of AEMO's documentation, with plenty of additional information, a search bar, and other enhancements.
When you find that lacking, you can check the Nemosis Wiki and Watt Clarity.
For specific terms such as "bidirectional unit", "wholesale demand response" etc, you may need to search elsewhere on AEMO's website or the glossary of the NER to find answers. Note that AEMO sometimes restructure their website in a way which breaks bookmarks, search engine results and hyperlinks within their PDFs. Aside from that, their website often has very high-level information aimed at the general public, and some extremely niche detail, without much of a middle ground for researchers who want to understand concepts without trading in the market.
Machine-readable Schema
AEMO does not publish a machine-readable schema. e.g. they do not publish a json file containing all column names and types. (They do privately share SQL scripts for creating tables with market participants via FTP.)
I have web-scraped their documentation for humans, across several sources (e.g. including example values), and put it into machine-readable json format here. This is a non-standard format, and may change. On each per-table page, there are links for JSON in the same format, and standard JSON Schema files. If you want content in a different format, contact me.