Research Object Crates – Bundling Research (Meta-)Data

Research Object Crate (RO-Crate) is an open, community-driven data package specification to describe all kinds of file-based data, as well as entities outside the package. In order to do so, it uses the widespread JSON format, representing Linked Data (JSON-LD), allowing to link to external information. This makes the format flexible and machine-readable. These packages are referred to as (RO-)crates.

We developed the ro-crate-java library, which allows creating, modifying, and validating crates using the Java programming language. The focus of development was the ease of use: We aimed to make it intuitive and easy to create valid crates, without knowing the specification too well.