Chapter 4: RO-Crate

This chapter introduces RO-Crate, a pragmatic method of packaging data alongside structured metadata that is inline with the FAIR principles. This has been implemented to investigate RQ2.

Section 4.1 describes the RO-Crate purpose, community effort and tooling and demonstrates how RO-Crate has been applied.

Section 4.2 shows how RO-Crate can be used to achieve the FDO principles covered in chapter 3.

Section 4.3 contributes a formal definition of RO-Crate using first order logic.

Supplementary material that may assist readers of this chapter includes the motivation of RO-Crate, a lightweight approach to Research Object data packaging [Ó Carragáin 2019b]. RO-Crate builds on the long history of Research Objects, which is covered by earlier works [Bechhofer 2013, Belhajjame 2015, Goble 2018] and the Wf4Ever project.

• Section 4.1: Packaging research artefacts with RO-Crate
• Section 4.2: Creating lightweight FAIR Digital Objects with RO-Crate
• Section 4.3: Formalizing RO-Crate in First Order Logic