2025-10-13: The RO-Crate website and specification superseded this website after 2020. These pages are no longer maintained.
We strongly recommend that new Research Object users adopt the RO-Crate specification.
A Data Package (or DataPackage) is a simple way of “packaging” up data.
To create a Data Package, all you need to do is place a “descriptor” file named datapackage.json in the top-level directory of your set of data files.
Why Data Packages? How Can They Help?
Imagine a situation such as the following:
-
You have a set of data files in a directory (and subdirectories) - whether locally or online
-
You want to provide basic info for this collection (the “dataset”) - perhaps you want to publish this data for others, or simply to manage it better yourself
-
Information like: author, license, list of files in the dataset (and possibly info on those files, like a schema)
The Data Package approach provides a very simple, web friendly, standardized and extensible, way for you to do this. [From http://data.okfn.org/]