base_path is indeed getting clunky, I'm slightly uncomfortable of having different behaviors depending on which function gets called here, so maybe just getting rid of it would be best.

Not sure I follow. The use of base_path is consistent across methods. If provided it will try use it as a root directory where all files are expected to be found. If not provided it will assume either the current working directory (e.g. from_url) or the root of the provided yml (e.g. from_file). Are these two defaults what are raising flags for you? Happy to go with a different one if you want. We can also just throw an error at the level of the DeviceReader class if no path was provided and the user try to use the no-input overload of the register load function.

Still looking for a better name:

• from_yaml: may be misleading since the others also ultimately use YAML
• from_schema: maybe a little bit better

from_schema makes me nervous as people might think you should pass the actuall schema file (i.e. .yml). Would from_string be better (ToString is also a thing after all haha)?