28.–30. Apr. 2026
DKFZ, Heidelberg
Europe/Berlin Zeitzone

An Editor for Research Object Crates to empower FAIR data sharing

D13
Nicht eingeplant
3m
Communication Center (DKFZ, Heidelberg)

Communication Center

DKFZ, Heidelberg

Im Neuenheimer Feld 280 69120 Heidelberg, germany
Demo Poster 8. From Harmonisation to Action(ability) POSTERS & DEMOS - with Coffee

Sprecher

Christopher Raquet (KIT)

Beschreibung

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.

Alternative Track 2. Empowering Research Communities: Turning Metadata into Action

Autor

Christopher Raquet (KIT)

Präsentationsmaterialien