RO-Crate: A framework for packaging research products into FAIR Research Objects
Channel: Stian Soiland-Reyes
Date: 2021-02-26

* Presenters: Carole Goble https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1219-2137, Stian Soiland-Reyes https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9842-9718
* Presented at: https://www.rd-alliance.org/group/data-fabric-ig/wiki/rda-ig-data-fabric-fair-digital-objects
* RO-Crate: http://www.researchobject.org/ro-crate/ 

RO-Crate is a community effort to establish a lightweight approach to packaging research products (data, scripts, methods and so on) together and with their metadata. At its heart RO-Crate is a practical way to aggregate files and/or any URI-addressable content, with contextual information to aid decisions about re-use. It uses off the shelf and developer familiar web technologies that make it machine and human readable and search engine friendly. This small step is a springboard to Digital Object exchange, access, preservation and reproducibility.

We briefly present the motivation and approach of RO-Crate and give examples from cultural heritage and biosciences.We also present our preliminary investigations in using RO-Crate as a means of implementing FAIR Digital Objects as defined by the FDOF for the Natural History Digital Specimen Objects in the EU Synthesys+ project for the DISSCo ESFRI of Natural History digital collections.