There is no canonical data model in Camel. The message is routed as is (its just an Object). So there is no need to enforce marshal/unmarshal during routing.

However the various Camel components uses automatic type conversion to adapt the message to the underlying transport in question.

http://camel.apache.org/type-converter.html

And then Camel have a concept named Data Formats which can marshal/unmarshal between well known formats

http://camel.apache.org/data-format.html