There are almost 50 years of research on fragility and vulnerability assessment, both key elements in seismic risk or loss estimation. This paper presents the online database of physical vulnerability models that has been created as part of the Global Earthquake Model (GEM) initiative. The database comprises fragility and vulnerability curves, damage-to-loss models, and capacity curves for various types of structures. The attributes that have been selected to characterize each function, the constraints of setting up a usable database, the challenges in collecting these models, and the current trends in the development of vulnerability models are discussed in this study. The current collection of models leverages upon the outputs of several initiatives, such as GEM's Global Vulnerability Consortium and the European Syner-G project. This database is publicly available through the web-based GEM OpenQuake-platform http://doi.org/10.13117/GEM.DATASET.VULN.WEB-V1.0.