Making EOSC Research Objects FAIR with RO-Crate: A common metadata overlay for EOSC repositories

EOSC strongly emphasises FAIR and interoperability, but current guidelines leave too many choices to each repository developer, which means lack of interoperability and little shared tooling. RO-Crate makes a common metadata overlay across established EOSC repositories and provides pragmatic step-by-step guidelines and software libraries for implementers. 

RO-Crate is a community-developed method to share Research Objects with FAIR metadata, based on Web standards and best practices. RO-Crate is now being established as a viable Linked Data realisation of FAIR Digital Objects, highlighted by the EOSC Interoperability Framework. 

In this talk we demonstrate how RO-Crate is used by multiple EU, US and Australian projects, across research domains from life sciences to cultural heritage. We show how RO-Crate helps researchers gather FAIR descriptions of heterogeneous resources in EOSC repositories, including computational workflows.

RO-Crate gives flexibility for domain-specific extensions and re-use FAIR infrastructure in EOSC, e.g. PID services and semantic registries.