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APPENDIX: RO-Crate JSON-LD

Table of contents

  1. Describing entities in JSON-LD
  2. RO-Crate JSON-LD Context
  3. RO-Crate JSON-LD Media type
  4. Extending RO-Crate
  5. Adding new or ad hoc vocabulary terms
    1. Choosing URLs for ad hoc terms
    2. Add local definitions of ad hoc terms

It is not necessary to use JSON-LD tooling to generate or parse the RO-Crate Metadata File, although JSON-LD tools may make it easier to conform to this specification, e.g. handling relative URIs. It is however RECOMMENDED to use JSON tooling to handle JSON syntax and escaping rules.

This appendix shows a brief JSON-LD introduction for complying with the RO-Crate Metadata File requirements.

The example below shows the overall structure of a flattened, compacted RO-Crate Metadata File where @context refers to the RO-Crate JSON-LD Context, while @graph is a flat array of the entities that constitute this RO-Crate.

{ "@context": "https://w3id.org/ro/crate/1.1/context",
  "@graph": [

    {
      "@type": "CreativeWork",
      "@id": "ro-crate-metadata.json",
      "conformsTo": {"@id": "https://w3id.org/ro/crate/1.1"},
      "about": {"@id": "./"},
      "description": "RO-Crate Metadata File Descriptor (this file)"
    },
    {
      "@id": "./",
      "@type": "Dataset",
      "name": "Example RO-Crate",
      "description": "The RO-Crate Root Data Entity",
      "hasPart": [
        {"@id": "data1.txt"},
        {"@id": "data2.txt"}
      ]
    },


    {
      "@id": "data1.txt",
      "@type": "File",
      "description": "One of hopefully many Data Entities",
      "author": {"@id": "#alice"},
      "contentLocation":  {"@id": "http://sws.geonames.org/8152662/"}
    },
    {
      "@id": "data2.txt",
      "@type": "File"
    },

    {
      "@id": "#alice",
      "@type": "Person",
      "name": "Alice",
      "description": "One of hopefully many Contextual Entities"
    },
    {
      "@id": "http://sws.geonames.org/8152662/",
      "@type": "Place",
      "name": "Catalina Park"
    }
 ]
}

Note: entities above have been shortened for brevity, see the individual sections for data entities and contextual entities.

The order of the @graph array is not significant. Above we see that the RO-Crate JSON-LD graph contains the RO-Crate Metadata File Descriptor, the Root Data Entity, any Data Entities and any Contextual Entities.

Describing entities in JSON-LD

Properties of an entity can refer to another URL or entity by using the form {"@id": "uri-reference"} as in the example above, where the author property in the File entity refer to the Person entity, identified as #alice.

Identifiers in @id SHOULD be either a valid absolute URI like http://example.com/, or a URI path relative to the RO-Crate root directory. Although legal in JSON-LD, @id paths in RO-Crate SHOULD NOT use ../ to climb out of the RO-Crate Root, rather such references SHOULD be translated to absolute URIs. See also section Core Metadata for Data Entities.

Care must be taken to express any relative paths using / separator and escape special characters like space (%20). As JSON-LD supports IRIs, international characters in identifiers SHOULD be encoded in UTF-8 rather than %-escaped.

Because the RO-Crate JSON-LD is flattened, all described entities must be JSON objects as direct children of the @graph element rather than being nested under another object or array. Properties referencing entities must use a JSON object with @id as the only key, e.g. "author": {"@id": "https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1825-0097"}

If no obvious identifier is available for a contextual entity, an identifier local to the RO-Crate Metadata File can be generated, for instance {"@id": "#alice"} or {"@id": "#ac0bd781-7d91-4cdf-b2ad-7305921c7650"}. Although it is RECOMMENDED to use #-based local identifiers, identifiers in @id MAY alternatively be a blank node identifier (e.g. _:alice).

Multiple values and references can be represented using JSON arrays, as exemplified in hasPart above; however as the RO-Crate JSON-LD is in compacted form, any single-element arrays like "author": [{"@id": "#alice"}] SHOULD be unpacked to a single value like "author": {"@id": "#alice"}.

RO-Crate JSON-LD Context

The main purpose of the @context is to relate JSON property keys and @type references to their Linked Data identifiers, which in RO-Crate is based primarily on http://schema.org/ URIs.

In other uses of JSON-LD the context may perform more automatic or detailed mapping, but the RO-Crate JSON-LD context is deliberately flat, listing every property and type.

To find the full description of a particular property or type, follow its URI from the context. For instance, we can find within the context https://w3id.org/ro/crate/1.1/context that author above is mapped to http://schema.org/author:

   "author": "http://schema.org/author",

The RO-Crate JSON-LD Context may either be set by reference to https://w3id.org/ro/crate/1.1/context or by value (merging the two documents).

Consider the below (simplified) example of by reference using a versioned permalink:

{ "@context": "https://w3id.org/ro/crate/1.1/context",
  "@graph": [
    {
      "@id": "ro-crate-metadata.json",
      "@type": "CreativeWork",
      "description": "RO-Crate Metadata File Descriptor (this file)",
      "conformsTo": {"@id": "https://w3id.org/ro/crate/1.1"},
      "about": {"@id": "./"}
    }
  ]
}

The above is equivalent to the following JSON-LD using an embedded context, by adding the subset of corresponding keys from the external @context:

{ "@context": {
      "CreativeWork": "http://schema.org/CreativeWork",
      "about": "http://schema.org/about",
      "description": "http://schema.org/description",
      "conformsTo": "http://purl.org/dc/terms/conformsTo",
      "about": "http://schema.org/about"
  },
  "@graph": [
    {
      "@id": "ro-crate-metadata.json",
      "@type": "CreativeWork",
      "description": "RO-Crate Metadata File Descriptor (this file)",
      "conformsTo": {"@id": "https://w3id.org/ro/crate/1.1"},
      "about": {"@id": "./"}
    }
  ]
}

Note that conformsTo is retained to indicate which version of RO-Crate specification the root data entity conforms to.

While the second form is more verbose, one advantage is that it is “archivable” as it does not require Internet access for retrieving the @context permalink. Tools consuming or archiving RO-Crate MAY replace by-reference @context URIs with an embedded context by using version-specific hard-coded contexts. See https://github.com/ResearchObject/ro-crate/releases to download the JSON-LD contexts corresponding to each version of this specification.

To check which RO-Crate version is used (in terms of properties and types expected), clients SHOULD check the property conformsTo on the RO-Crate Metadata File Descriptor rather than the value of @context.

RO-Crate consumers SHOULD NOT do the opposite substitution from an embedded context, but MAY use the JSON-LD flattening algorithm with compaction to a referenced RO-Crate JSON-LD context (see also notes on handling relative URI references below).

The JSON-LD flattening & compaction algorithms can be used to rewrite to a different @context, e.g. to https://schema.org/docs/jsonldcontext.jsonld or a different version of the RO-Crate JSON-LD Context.

RO-Crate JSON-LD Media type

The media type application/ld+json for ro-crate-metadata.json will, when following this specification, comply with the flattened/compacted JSON-LD profiles as well as https://w3id.org/ro/crate, which may be indicated in a HTTP response as:

HEAD http://example.com/ro-123/ro-crate-metadata.json HTTP/1.1

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/ld+json; profile="http://www.w3.org/ns/json-ld#flattened http://www.w3.org/ns/json-ld#compacted https://w3id.org/ro/crate"

Note that most web servers will however serve *.json as Content-Type: application/json.

Requesting the RO-Crate metadata file from a browser may also need permission through CORS header Access-Control-Allow-Origin (however extra care should be taken if the RO-Crates require access control).

To change the configuration of Apache HTTPD 2, add the following to .htaccess or equivalent config file:

<Files "ro-crate-metadata.json">
  ForceType 'application/ld+json;profile="http://www.w3.org/ns/json-ld#flattened http://www.w3.org/ns/json-ld#compacted https://w3id.org/ro/crate"'

  Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin *
  Header set Access-Control-Expose-Headers "Content-Length,Content-Range,Content-Type"
</Files>

For NGINX, try:

location ~ ro-crate-metadata.json$ {
        types { } default_type 'application/ld+json;profile="http://www.w3.org/ns/json-ld#flattened http://www.w3.org/ns/json-ld#compacted https://w3id.org/ro/crate"';

        add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' '*';
        add_header 'Access-Control-Expose-Headers' 'Content-Length,Content-Range,Content-Type';
}

For Content-Delivery Networks (e.g. GitHub pages) a symbolic link to ro-crate-metadata.jsonld may help to create an alias that can be served as application/ld+json:

ln -s ro-crate-metadata.json ro-crate-metadata.jsonld

Extending RO-Crate

To extend RO-Crate, implementers SHOULD try to use existing http://schema.org/ properties and classes and MAY use terms from other vocabularies and ontologies when this is not possible.

The terms (properties and types) used SHOULD be added as keys to the @context in the RO-Crate JSON-LD (if not present). To avoid duplicating the RO-Crate JSON-LD Context the @context: [] array form SHOULD be used as shown below.

URIs in the @context SHOULD resolve to a useful human readable page. When this is not possible - for example if the URI resolves to an RDF ontology file, a human-readable URI SHOULD be provided using a sameAs description.

For example. The @id URI http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/interviewee from the BIBO ontology intends to resolve to an ontology file, which is not useful for humans, however the HTML section http://neologism.ecs.soton.ac.uk/bibo.html#interviewee is human-readable. To read more about best practices for content negotiation of vocabularies, we refer the reader to Best Practice Recipes for Publishing RDF Vocabularies.

{
  "@context": [ 
    "https://w3id.org/ro/crate/1.1/context",
    {"interviewee": "http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/interviewee"},
  ],
  "@graph": [
  {
      "@id": "http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/interviewee",
      "sameAs": "http://neologism.ecs.soton.ac.uk/bibo.html#interviewee",
      "@type": "Thing"
  }
 ]
}

When generating the RO-Crate Website from RO-Crate JSON-LD, the code MUST use a sameAs URI (if present) as a target for an explanatory link for the term instead of the Linked Data URI supplied in the @context.

Where there is no RDF ontology available, then implementors SHOULD attempt to provide context by creating stable web-accessible URIs to document properties and classes, for example, by linking to a page describing an XML element or an attribute from an XML schema, pending the publication of a formal ontology.

Adding new or ad hoc vocabulary terms

Context terms must ultimately map to HTTP(s) URIs which poses challenges for crate-authors wishing to use their own vocabularies.

RO-Crate provides some strategies to add a new term (a Class or Property) that is not in Schema.org or another published vocabulary, so that there is a stable URI that can be added to the @context.

Choosing URLs for ad hoc terms

For projects that have their own web-presence, URLs MAY be defined there and SHOULD resolve to useful content. For example for a project with web page https://criminalcharacters.com/ the property education could have a URL: https://criminalcharacters.com/vocab#education which resolves to an HTML page that explains the term using HTML anchors:

<div id="education">
  <h1>Property: education</h1>
  <p>Literacy of prisoner. Prison authorities would record the prisoner’s statement as to whether they could read and write …
  </p>
</div>

Ensure you have a consistent use of http or https (preferring https) as well as consistent path /vocab vs /vocab/ vs /vocab/index.html (preferring the shortest that is also visible in browser).

For ad hoc terms where the crate author does not have the resources to create and maintain an HTML page, authors may use the RO-Crate public namespace (https://w3id.org/ro/terms/) to reserve their terms. For example, an ad-hoc URL MAY be used in the form https://w3id.org/ro/terms/criminalcharacters#education where criminalcharacters is acting as a namespace for one or more related terms like education. Ad-hoc namespaces under https://w3id.org/ro/terms/ are available on first-come-first-serve basis; to avoid clashes, namespaces SHOULD be registered by submitting terms and definitions to the RO-Crate terms project.

In both cases, to use an ad-hoc term in an RO-Crate, the URI MUST be included in the local context:

{
  "@context": [ 
    "https://w3id.org/ro/crate/1.1/context",
    {"education": "https://criminalcharacters.com/vocab#education",
     "interests": "https://w3id.org/ro/terms/criminalcharacters#interests"},
  ],
  "@graph": [ ... ]
}

Add local definitions of ad hoc terms

Following the conventions used by Schema.org, ad-hoc terms SHOULD also include definitions in the RO-Crate with at minimum:

  • @type of either rdfs:Class (contextual entity type) or rdf:Property (attribute of an contextual entity)
  • rdfs:label with the human readable version of the term, e.g. makesFood has label makes food
  • rdfs:comment documenting and clarifying the meaning of the term. For instance the term sentence in a prisoner vocabulary will have a different explanation than sentence in a linguistic vocabulary.
{
    "@id": "https://criminalcharacters.com/vocab#education",
    "@type": "rdf:Property",
    "rdfs:label": "education",
    "rdfs:comment": "Literacy of prisoner. ..."
}

It is not a requirement to use English for the terms, labels or comments.

More information about the relationship of this term to other terms MAY be provided using domainIncludes, rangeIncludes, rdfs:subClassOf following the conventions used in the Schema.org schema.