RO-CRATE

Revision as of 13:56, 6 February 2025

RO-CRATE (Research Object Crate) is a packaging standard and metadata designed to describe research data and its inter-dependencies.

About

RO-CRATE specifies a metadata file that must use the filename ro-crate-metadata.json. The ro-crate-metadata.json file's presence in a directory identifies the root directory of a RO-CRATE object. The name of the containing directory is not fixed. Version 1.0 and before defined the root with a .jsonld extension, so: ro-crate-metadata.jsonld.

RO-CRATE's metadata file describes data entries (files, directories) and contextual entities (licenses, authorship, funding, instrumentation, etc.). As linked data, the packaging format describes a graph of the package's content and its links to contextual information about its content. Its goal to enable reproducible, transparent, research.

RO-CRATE structure

The RO-CRATE package structure looks as follows.

<RO-Crate root directory>/
|   ro-crate-metadata.json    # RO-Crate Metadata File MUST be present 
|   ro-crate-preview.html     # RO-Crate Website homepage MAY be present
|   ro-crate-preview_files/   # MAY be present
|    | [other RO-Crate Website files]
|   [payload files and directories]  # 0 or more

RO-Crate Website homepage

Provides a human readable view of the RO-CRATE package. Tools exist to help support the creation of this file.

RO-CRATE specification

Current version

RO-CRATE 1.1

Previous versions

RO-CRATE 1.0 RO-CRATE 0.2

Draft version

RO-CRATE 1.2

RO-CRATE file format

RO-CRATES file is built upon JSON and JSON-LD. The structure of the format provides a JSON-LD @context followed by a @graph of its data and contextual entities. The following example the RO-CRATE Packaging Data with RO-CRATE tutorial.

{
  "@context": "https://w3id.org/ro/crate/1.1/context",
  "@graph": [
    {
      "@id": "ro-crate-metadata.json",
      "@type": "CreativeWork",
      "conformsTo": {"@id": "https://w3id.org/ro/crate/1.1"},
      "about": {"@id": "./"}
    },
    {
      "@id": "./",
      "@type": ["Dataset", "LearningResource"],
      "hasPart": [
        {"@id": "data.csv"}
      ],
      "name": "Example dataset for RO-Crate specification",
      "description": "Official rainfall readings for Katoomba, NSW 2022, Australia",
      "datePublished": "2023-05-22T12:03:00+0100",
      "license": {"@id": "http://spdx.org/licenses/CC0-1.0"},
      "author": { "@id": "https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1825-0097" },
      "publisher": {"@id": "https://ror.org/05gq02987"}
    },
    {
      "@id": "data.csv",
      "@type": "File",
      "name": "Rainfall Katoomba 2022-02",
      "description": "Rainfall data for Katoomba, NSW Australia February 2022",
      "encodingFormat": "text/csv",
      "license": {"@id": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/"}
    },
    {
      "@id": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/",
      "@type": "CreativeWork",
      "name": "CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 International",
      "description": "Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International"
    },    
    {
      "@id": "http://spdx.org/licenses/CC0-1.0",
      "@type": "CreativeWork",
      "name": "CC0-1.0",
      "description": "Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal",
      "url": "https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/"
    },    
    {
      "@id": "https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1825-0097",
      "@type": "Person", 
      "name": "Josiah Carberry",
      "affiliation": {
        "@id": "https://ror.org/05gq02987"
      }
    },
    {
      "@id": "https://ror.org/05gq02987",
      "@type": "Organization",
      "name": "Brown University",
      "url": "http://www.brown.edu/"
    }
  ]
}

Identifications based upon this structure might look for the appropriate context for a given version, and existence of the @graph array.

Use Cases

RO-CRATE's use-cases are described on the RO-CRATE homepage. Domain uses can be found under this page, ranging from Biology, to Chemistry, History, and Informatics.

Tools and libraries

• RO-CRATE tooling from LDaCA on GitHub.
• Tooling and specifications from the RO-CRATE community on Github.
• CRATE-O browser based editor
• RO-CRATE package preview generator

Resources

• RO-CRATE homepage
• RO-CRATE specification homepage
• Dataverse export of RO-CRATE
• RO-CRATE Preview (HTML) generation