Research Object Crate (RO-Crate) is a packaging specification for describing and sharing research data. It packages data together with associated metadata in a FAIR manner. For wide community adoption, the format must be tangible for its users. Programmatic APIs are often insufficient for interactive exploration, on-the-fly editing, and introspection by researchers, data stewards, or curators. Although RO-Crate editors have been developed in the past, the most prominent tool (Describo) has recently been discontinued. To fill this gap in RO-Crate tooling, we present NovaCrate, a web-based editor for viewing, editing, and validating RO-Crates. The Entity Editor shown in the attached screenshot is the core piece of NovaCrate. It allows editing all metadata entities through a tabbed interface, including dynamic property fetching from custom vocabularies and file previews for common formats. Other features of NovaCrate include a File Explorer and a Graph of the metadata relationships. NovaCrate emphasizes an intuitive user interface as well as good usability. This is vital to ensure the accessibility of the editor for a wide range of people with varying knowledge of the RO-Crate specification. By allowing researchers to directly interact with the metadata of their RO-Crates, NovaCrate makes the RO-Crate concept tangible. NovaCrate is equipped with the groundwork to further extend it for distributed and collaborative workflows, e.g., through the integration of NovaCrate into RO-Crate repositories.
Christopher Raquet (Thu,) studied this question.