ResearchObject.org (RO)
Published April 26, 2023 | Version 1.1.3
Technical note Open

RO-Crate Metadata Specification 1.1.3

Creators

Contributors

Description

Web-version: https://w3id.org/ro/crate/1.1

This document specifies a method, known as RO-Crate (Research Object Crate), of aggregating and describing research data with associated metadata. RO-Crates can aggregate and describe any resource including files, URI-addressable resources, or use other addressing schemes to locate digital or physical data. RO-Crates can describe data in aggregate and at the individual resource level, with metadata to aid in discovery, re-use and long term management of data. Metadata includes the ability to describe the context of data and the entities involved in its production, use and reuse. For example: who created it, using which equipment, software and workflows, under what licenses can it be re-used, where was it collected, and/or where is it about.

RO-Crate uses JSON-LD to to express this metadata using linked data, describing data resources as well as contextual entities such as people, organizations, software and equipment as a series of linked JSON-LD objects - using common published vocabularies, chiefly schema.org.

The core of RO-Crate is a JSON-LD file, the RO-Crate Metadata File, named ro-crate-metadata.json. This file contains structured metadata about the dataset as a whole (the Root Data Entity) and, optionally, about some or all of its files. This provides a simple way to, for example, assert the authors (e.g. people, organizations) of the RO-Crate or one its files, or to capture more complex provenance for files, such as how they were created using software and equipment.

While providing the formal specification for RO-Crate, this document also aims to be a practical guide for software authors to create tools for generating and consuming research data packages, with explanation by examples.

Notes

Recommendation published by researchobject.org - see https://w3id.org/ro/crate/1.1 for web version. This is a patch release identical to 1.1.2 except for a JSON-LD typo fix

Files

ro-crate-1.1.2.pdf

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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 documented by
https://w3id.org/ro/crate (URL)
Dataset: https://www.researchobject.org/ro-crate/1.1/ro-crate-metadata.jsonld (URL)
https://www.researchobject.org/ro-crate/1.1/ro-crate-preview.html (URL)
Is identical to
https://github.com/ResearchObject/ro-crate/releases/tag/1.1.3 (URL)
Technical note: https://w3id.org/ro/crate/1.1 (URL)
https://www.researchobject.org/ro-crate/1.1/ (URL)
Is new version of
Technical note: https://w3id.org/ro/crate/1.0 (URL)
Is supplemented by
Software: https://w3id.org/ro/crate/1.1/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)