Visualizing a crate as HTML preview
Last updated on 2025-04-17 | Edit this page
Overview
Questions
- How can an RO-Crate be rendered without showing the JSON?
- How can I generate a preview of the RO-Crate?
Objectives
- Explore a HTML preview of an RO-Crate
- (Advanced) Try the ro-crate-html tool
HTML preview
An RO-Crate can be distributed on disk, in a packaged format such as
a zip file or disk image, or placed on a static website. In any of these
cases, an RO-Crate can have an accompanying HTML version
(ro-crate-metadata.html
) designed to be human-readable.

Example dataset for RO-Crate specification
- CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 International
- Brown University
- The context, and for root dataset: existance, valid identifier,
name, description, license and date published.
- The other entities were not checked, e.g. the
affiliation
of the author.
Advanced: Generating HTML preview
If you have Node JS installed, you
can install and try the ro-crate-html
tool on your crate1
folder:
Or if you have Docker, something like:
BASH
docker pull simleo/rochtml
docker run -v $(pwd):/crate -it simleo/rochtml -c ro-crate-preview_files /crate/ro-crate-metadata.json
The above will generate a ro-crate-preview.html
file
within your RO-Crate Root. Experiment with modifying the Metadata file
and re-generating the HTML preview to see how your rendering differs
from the running
example.
Key Points
- RO-Crate can be rendered into a HTML preview
- RO-Crate previews tend to show each entity separately
- The preview HTML can be added as part of the RO-Crate