Declaring the root folder

Overview

Teaching: 2 min
Exercises: 1 min

Questions

• What is the root folder?

Objectives

• Create a top-level entity that can list the parts of the crate

RO-Crate Root

Next we’ll add another entity to the @graph array, to describe the RO-Crate Root:

{
    "@id": "./",
    "@type": "Dataset",
    "hasPart": [ 

    ]
}

By convention, in RO-Crate the @id value of ./ means that this entity describes the folder in which the RO-Crate metadata file is located. This reference from ro-crate-metadata.json is therefore semantically marking the crate1 folder as being the RO-Crate Root.

RO-Crates can be published on the Web

This example is a folder-based RO-Crate stored on disk, and therefore absolute paths are avoided, e.g. in case the root folder is moved or archived as a ZIP file.

If the crate is being served from a Web service, such as a data repository or database where files are not organized in folders, then the @id might be an absolute URI instead of ./ – this is one reason why we point to the root entity from the metadata descriptor, see section Root Data Entity for details.

Key Points

• The RO-Crate Root is the top-level object of the RO-Crate

• The root identifier may be a URL, but commonly just ./ for the current folder