Visualizing a crate as HTML preview

Overview

Teaching: 3 min
Exercises: 3 min

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.

Navigate the RO-Crate preview

Try navigating the preview of the running example and find:

1. What is the license of the rainfall CSV?
2. What is the affiliation of the crate’s author?
3. What does the Validity Check inspect
4. What is not covered by this check?

Solution

1. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 International
2. Brown University
3. The context, and for root dataset: existance, valid identifier, name, description, license and date published.
4. 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:

npm i -g ro-crate-html
rochtml crate1/ro-crate-metadata.json

Or if you have Docker, something like:

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