ResearchObject.org (RO)
Published June 22, 2026 | Version 1.3.0
Standard Open

RO-Crate Metadata Specification 1.3.0

Authors/Creators

Contributors

  • 1. ROR icon University of Manchester

Description

Web-version: https://w3id.org/ro/crate/1.3

This document specifies a method, known as RO-Crate (Research Object Crate), of aggregating and describing data for distribution, re-use, publishing, preservation and archiving. RO-Crates aggregate data into a Dataset, and may describe any resource including files, URI-addressable resources, or use other addressing schemes to locate digital or physical data. Describing resources includes technical metadata such as file sizes and types as well as contextual information including how datasets and files were created, and where, how they were collated and collected, who was involved in the process, what equipment and software was used, who funded the work, how to cite it, and crucially, how it may be reused, and by whom.

The core of RO-Crate is a machine-readable linked-data document in JSON-LD format known as an RO-Crate Metadata Document. RO-Crate metadata documents can to a large extent be created and processed just like any other JSON: knowledge of JSON-LD is not needed, unless extending RO-Crate with additional concepts or combining RO-Crate with other Linked Data technologies.

This document, the RO-Crate specification, introduces the general RO-Crate concepts through a running example, adding normative pages that define in more detail these and other concepts using separate examples and recommendations.

Notes

Recommendation published by researchobject.org - see https://w3id.org/ro/crate/1.3 for web version. This is a minor release with several changes, see https://www.researchobject.org/ro-crate/specification/1.3/appendix/changelog.html

Files

ro-crate-1.3.0.md

Files (2.8 MB)

Name Size Download all
md5:40fc77a9c91e2ba85b0bf8b9e586df9f
1.1 MB Download
md5:5123930ee52c7c424e09cab1fdf93e11
304.5 kB Preview Download
md5:6de4014ad3bb4d7239c44166158474d8
684.0 kB Preview Download
md5:cd2cfa677a7e0d1f553c503478394ff3
196.9 kB Download
md5:86ffd6390fa5b65042d19bd7403f7f36
82.7 kB Preview Download
md5:90429c4c26dd60141d2c2e8ee4d7277f
402.7 kB Download

Additional details

Cites
Technical note: 10.17487/RFC2119 (DOI)
http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-json-ld-20140116/ (URL)
Technical note: 10.17487/RFC7159 (DOI)
Technical note: 10.17487/RFC3986 (DOI)
https://www.w3.org/TR/html52/ (URL)
10.25490/a97f-egyk (DOI)
Technical note: 10.17487/RFC8493 (DOI)
https://w3id.org/ro/2016-01-28/ (URL)
https://github.com/duraspace/pcdm/wiki (URL)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exif (URL)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BagIt (URL)
10.25490/a97f-egyk (DOI)
Technical note: https://www.w3.org/TR/swbp-vocab-pub/ (URL)
Is described by
Journal article: 10.3233/DS-210053 (DOI)
Is documented by
https://w3id.org/ro/crate (URL)
Dataset: https://www.researchobject.org/ro-crate/specification/1.3/ro-crate-metadata.jsonld (URL)
https://www.researchobject.org/ro-crate/specification/1.3/ro-crate-preview.html (URL)
Is identical to
https://github.com/ResearchObject/ro-crate/releases/tag/1.3.0 (URL)
Technical note: https://w3id.org/ro/crate/1.3 (URL)
https://www.researchobject.org/ro-crate/specification/1.3/ (URL)
Is new version of
Technical note: https://w3id.org/ro/crate/1.2 (URL)
Is supplemented by
Software: https://w3id.org/ro/crate/1.3/context (URL)
https://github.com/ResearchObject/ro-crate (URL)
References
https://www.researchobject.org/ (URL)
https://schema.org/ (URL)
https://ocfl.io/ (URL)
https://orcid.org/ (URL)
https://ror.org/ (URL)
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/PRONOM/Default.aspx (URL)
https://www.geonames.org/ (URL)
https://omeka.org/ (URL)
http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/interviewee (PURL)
http://neologism.ecs.soton.ac.uk/bibo.html#interviewee (URL)