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Terminology

RO-Crate: A dataset, which is described in a JSON-LD RO-Crate Metadata Document.

RO-Crate Metadata Document: A JSON-LD document that describes the RO-Crate with structured data in form of RO-Crate JSON-LD. This may be stored in a file-system as an RO-Crate Metadata File or served via an API.

RO-Crate Metadata File: An RO-Crate Metadata Document stored in a file named ro-crate-metadata.json in the RO-Crate Root. See section RO-Crate Metadata Document.

Attached RO-Crate: An RO-Crate that contains a payload of one or more files, stored/published on a typical file system with an RO-Crate Metadata File:. See section Types of RO-Crate.

Detached RO-Crate: A RO-Crate described by an RO-Crate Metadata Document without a payload of files, not having its own RO-Crate Root. See section Types of RO-Crate.

RO-Crate Root: The top-level directory of a Attached RO-Crate, indicated by the presence of the RO-Crate Metadata File ro-crate-metadata.json. See section RO-Crate structure

RO-Crate Metadata Descriptor: A Contextual Entity of type CreativeWork, which describes the RO-Crate Metadata Document and links it to the Root Data Entity. See section RO-Crate Metadata Descriptor

RO-Crate Website: Human-readable HTML pages which describe the RO-Crate (i.e. the Root Data Entity, its Data Entities and Context Entities), with a home-page at ro-crate-preview.html. See section RO-Crate Website.

Type: A classification of objects or their descriptions. The type (or “class”) is given as a short-hand key, mapped by the RO-Crate JSON-LD Context to a URI that has the type definition. See appendix RO-Crate JSON-LD.

Data Entity: A JSON-LD representation (in the RO-Crate Metadata Document) of a directory, file, or other Web resource which is considered contained by the RO-Crate. See section Data entities.

Property: A relationship from one entity to another entity, or to a value. The type of relationship is identified by a URI, mapped to a key by JSON-LD. See appendix RO-Crate JSON-LD.

Root Data Entity: A Data Entity of type Dataset, representing the RO-Crate as a whole. See section Root Data Entity.

JSON-LD: A JSON-based file format for storing Linked Data. This document assumes JSON-LD 1.0. JSON-LD use a context to map from JSON keys to URIs. See appendix RO-Crate JSON-LD.

JSON: The JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) Data Interchange Format as defined by RFC 7159; a structured text file format that can be programmatically consumed and generated in a wide range of programming languages. The main JSON structures are objects ({}) indexed by keys, sequential arrays ([]) and literal values ("").

Contextual Entity: A JSON-LD representation of an entity associated with another Entity, in order to adequately describe it. For example, a Person, Organization (including research projects), item of equipment (IndividualProduct), license or any other thing or event that forms part of the metadata for a Data Entity. Properties of contextual entities may refer to further entities. See section Contextual Entities.

Linked Data: A data structure where properties, types and resources are identified with URIs, which if retrieved over the Web, further describe or provide the identified property/type/resource.

URI: A Uniform Resource Identifier as defined in RFC 3986, for example http://example.com/path/file.html - commonly known as URL. In this document the term URI includes IRI, which also permit international Unicode characters. The URI identifies a downloadable resource (e.g. an image) or a concept (e.g. a type definition).

URI Path: The relative path element of an URI as defined in RFC3986 section 3.3, e.g. path/file.html

RO-Crate JSON-LD Context: A JSON-LD context that provides Linked Data mapping for RO-Crate metadata to vocabularies like Schema.org. This mapping assigns meaning to the JSON keys, see appendix RO-Crate JSON-LD.

RO-Crate JSON-LD: JSON-LD that use the RO-Crate JSON-LD Context and contain RO-Crate metadata, written as if flattened and then compacted according to the rules in JSON-LD 1.0. The RO-Crate JSON-LD for an RO-Crate is stored or transmitted in the _RO-Crate Metadata Document.

Linked Data conventions

Throughout this specification, RDF terms (properties, types) are referred to using the keys defined in the RO-Crate JSON-LD Context.

Following Schema.org practice, property names start with lowercase letters and Type names start with uppercase letters.

In the RO-Crate Metadata Document the RDF terms use their RO-Crate JSON-LD names as defined in the RO-Crate JSON-LD Context, which is available at https://w3id.org/ro/crate/1.2-DRAFT/context