We use JSON to represent metadata that is either passed to the converter into DICOM, or that is extracted from DICOM representation.
As such, you will need to have some understanding of both DICOM and JSON if you want to use dcmqi.
We provide the following tools that can help you use dcmqi more effectively.
dicom-dump is an extension for Atom text editor that can be used to explore the content of DICOM data
web app can be used to see examples of metadata JSON for specific object types, to explore the schema, and to validate your own metadata JSON against the schema
You can check out our section for some reference material about JSON and DICOM that we found helpful.