Skip to main content Link Menu Expand (external link) Document Search Copy Copied

Research Object Crate (RO-Crate)

Permalink: https://w3id.org/ro/crate

Table of contents

  1. What is RO-Crate?
  2. Where did RO-Crate come from?
  3. Who is it for?
  4. How can I get started?
  5. What can I use RO-Crate with?
  6. RO-Crate in use
  7. Contribute to RO-Crate community
  8. Cite RO-Crate
    1. Cite RO-Crate as project/approach
    2. Cite RO-Crate Specification (any version)
    3. Other citations

News: RO-Crate Metadata specification 1.1 released

What is RO-Crate?

RO-Crate is a community effort to establish a lightweight approach to packaging research data with their metadata. It is based on schema.org annotations in JSON-LD, and aims to make best-practice in formal metadata description accessible and practical for use in a wider variety of situations, from an individual researcher working with a folder of data, to large data-intensive computational research environments.

Where did RO-Crate come from?

RO-Crate is the marriage of Research Objects with DataCrate. It aims to build on their respective strengths, but also to draw on lessons learned from those projects and similar research data packaging efforts. For more details, see background.

Who is it for?

The RO-Crate effort brings together practitioners from very different backgrounds, and with different motivations and use-cases. Among our core target users are: a) researchers engaged with computation and data-intensive, workflow-driven analysis; b) digital repository managers and infrastructure providers; c) individual researchers looking for a straight-forward tool or how-to guide to “FAIRify” their data; d) data stewards supporting research projects in creating and curating datasets.

We continue to gather usecases, please help us by adding more.

How can I get started?

Follow the RO-Crate tutorials for training material that introduce RO-Crate.

Alternatively, see the walk-through of an RO-Crate to learn by example.

RO-Crate is defined as an specification with recommendations and many inline examples:

See the specification page for older and future versions.

What can I use RO-Crate with?

We maintain a list of RO-Crate tools and examples.

RO-Crate in use

We describe some current cases and applications of where RO-Crate is in use for packaging and describing data, datasets and workflows.

Contribute to RO-Crate community

RO-Crate is developed as a community effort and an Open Source project.

You are welcome to join us! Contributors are expected to comply with our Code of Conduct to ensure an open and inclusive environment.

The RO-Crate team try to meet in a monthly telcon, see the rolling agenda for schedule, call-in details and minutes.

See also recent and upcoming events.

Cite RO-Crate

Cite RO-Crate as project/approach

Stian Soiland-Reyes, Peter Sefton, Mercè Crosas, Leyla Jael Castro, Frederik Coppens, José M. Fernández, Daniel Garijo, Björn Grüning, Marco La Rosa, Simone Leo, Eoghan Ó Carragáin, Marc Portier, Ana Trisovic, RO-Crate Community, Paul Groth, Carole Goble (2022):
Packaging research artefacts with RO-Crate.
Data Science 5(2)
https://doi.org/10.3233/DS-210053

Cite RO-Crate Specification (any version)

Peter Sefton, Eoghan Ó Carragáin, Stian Soiland-Reyes, Oscar Corcho, Daniel Garijo, Raul Palma, Frederik Coppens, Carole Goble, José María Fernández, Kyle Chard, Jose Manuel Gomez-Perez, Michael R Crusoe, Ignacio Eguinoa, Nick Juty, Kristi Holmes, Jason A. Clark, Salvador Capella-Gutierrez, Alasdair J. G. Gray, Stuart Owen, Alan R Williams, Giacomo Tartari, Finn Bacall, Thomas Thelen, Hervé Ménager, Laura Rodríguez Navas, Paul Walk, brandon whitehead, Mark Wilkinson, Paul Groth, Erich Bremer, LJ Garcia Castro, Karl Sebby, Alexander Kanitz, Ana Trisovic, Gavin Kennedy, Mark Graves, Jasper Koehorst, Simone Leo, Marc Portier (2020):
RO-Crate Metadata Specification
researchobject.org / Zenodo
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3406497

For citing a particular version of RO-Crate specification see its embedded Cite this version DOI.

Other citations

See also recent publications, presentations and citations.