RO-Crate in Python

Author(s) orcid logoSimone Leo avatar Simone Leoorcid logoBruno P. Kinoshita avatar Bruno P. Kinoshita
Editor(s) orcid logoHelena Rasche avatar Helena Rascheorcid logoEli Chadwick avatar Eli Chadwick
Tester(s) orcid logoEli Chadwick avatar Eli Chadwick
Overview
Questions:

  • What data is contained within an RO-Crate

  • How can I create an RO-Crate myself?

Objectives:

  • Create a custom, annotated RO-Crate

  • Use ORCIDs and other linked data to annotate datasets contained within the crate

Time estimation: 30 minutes
Supporting Materials:
Published: May 11, 2023
Last modification: Mar 26, 2024
License: Tutorial Content is licensed under Apache-2.0. The GTN Framework is licensed under MIT
PURL: https://gxy.io/GTN:T00341
Rating: 4.0 (1 recent ratings, 1 all time)
Revision: 13
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This tutorial will show you how to manipulate RO-Crates in Python using the ro-crate-py package. It is based on the ro-crate-py documentation.

Agenda

In this tutorial, we will cover:

  1. Creating an RO-Crate
    1. Appending elements to property values
    2. Adding remote entities
    3. Adding entities with an arbitrary type
  2. Consuming an RO-Crate
  3. Command Line Interface
    1. Crate initialization
    2. Adding items to the crate
    3. Example

Let’s start by installing the library via pip. Note that the name of the package is rocrate.

pip install rocrate

Creating an RO-Crate

In its simplest form, an RO-Crate is a directory tree with an ro-crate-metadata.json file at the top level. This file contains metadata about the other files and directories, represented by data entities. These metadata consist both of properties of the data entities themselves and of other, non-digital entities called contextual entities. A contextual entity can represent, for instance, a person, an organization or an event.

Suppose Alice and Bob worked on a research project together, and then wrote a paper about it; additionally, Alice prepared a spreadsheet containing experimental data, which Bob then used to generate a diagram. For the purpose of this tutorial, you can just create placeholder files for the documents:

import os

data_dir = "exp"
os.mkdir(data_dir)

for filename in ["paper.pdf", "results.csv", "diagram.svg"]:
    with open(os.path.join(data_dir, filename), "w") as file:
        pass

Let’s make an RO-Crate to represent this information:

from rocrate.rocrate import ROCrate

crate = ROCrate()
paper = crate.add_file("exp/paper.pdf", properties={
    "name": "manuscript",
    "encodingFormat": "application/pdf"
})
table = crate.add_file("exp/results.csv", properties={
    "name": "experimental data",
    "encodingFormat": "text/csv"
})
diagram = crate.add_file("exp/diagram.svg", dest_path="images/figure.svg", properties={
    "name": "bar chart",
    "encodingFormat": "image/svg+xml"
})

We’ve started by adding the data entities. Now we add contextual entities representing Alice and Bob:

from rocrate.model.person import Person

alice_id = "https://orcid.org/0000-0000-0000-0000"
bob_id = "https://orcid.org/0000-0000-0000-0001"
alice = crate.add(Person(crate, alice_id, properties={
    "name": "Alice Doe",
    "affiliation": "University of Flatland"
}))
bob = crate.add(Person(crate, bob_id, properties={
    "name": "Bob Doe",
    "affiliation": "University of Flatland"
}))

At this point, we have a representation of the various entities. Now we need to express the relationships between them. This is done by adding properties that reference other entities:

paper["author"] = [alice, bob]
table["author"] = alice
diagram["author"] = bob

You can also add whole directories together with their contents. In an RO-Crate, a directory is represented by the Dataset entity:

logs_dir = os.path.join(data_dir, "logs")
os.mkdir(logs_dir)

for filename in ["log1.txt", "log2.txt"]:
    with open(os.path.join(logs_dir, filename), "w") as file:
        pass

logs = crate.add_dataset("exp/logs")

Finally, we serialize the crate to disk:

crate.write("exp_crate")

This should generate an exp_crate directory containing copies of all the files we added and an ro-crate-metadata.json file containing a JSON-LD representation of the metadata. Note that we have chosen a different destination path for the diagram, while the paper and the spreadsheet have been placed at the top level with their names unchanged (the default).

Some applications and services support RO-Crates stored as archives. To save the crate in zip format, you can use write_zip:

crate.write_zip("exp_crate.zip")
Comment: How `rocrate` handles the contents of `exp/logs`

Exploring the exp_crate directory, we see that all files and directories contained in exp/logs have been added recursively to the crate. However, in the ro-crate-metadata.json file, only the top level Dataset with @id "exp/logs" is listed. This is because we used crate.add_dataset("exp/logs") rather than adding every file individually. There is no requirement to represent every file and folder within the crate in the ro-crate-metadata.json file - in fact, if there were many files in the crate it would be impractical to do so.

If you do want to add files and directories recursively to the metadata, use crate.add_tree instead of crate.add_dataset (but note that it only works on local directory trees).

Appending elements to property values

What ro-crate-py entities actually store is their JSON representation:

paper.properties()

{
  "@id": "paper.pdf",
  "@type": "File",
  "name": "manuscript",
  "encodingFormat": "application/pdf",
  "author": [
    {"@id": "https://orcid.org/0000-0000-0000-0000"},
    {"@id": "https://orcid.org/0000-0000-0000-0001"},
  ]
}

When paper["author"] is accessed, a new list containing the alice and bob entities is generated on the fly. For this reason, calling append on paper["author"] won’t actually modify the paper entity in any way. To add an author, use the append_to method instead:

donald = crate.add(Person(crate, "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Duck", properties={
  "name": "Donald Duck"
}))
paper.append_to("author", donald)

Note that append_to also works if the property to be updated is missing or has only one value:

for n in "Mickey_Mouse", "Scrooge_McDuck":
    p = crate.add(Person(crate, f"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/{n}"))
    donald.append_to("follows", p)

Adding remote entities

Data entities can also be remote:

input_data = crate.add_file("http://example.org/exp_data.zip")

By default the file won’t be downloaded, and will be referenced by its URI in ro-crate-metadata.json:

{
  "@id": "http://example.org/exp_data.zip",
  "@type": "File"
}

If you add fetch_remote=True to the add_file call, however, the library (when crate.write is called) will try to download the file and include it in the output crate.

Another option that influences the behavior when dealing with remote entities is validate_url, also False by default: if it’s set to True, when the crate is serialized, the library will try to open the URL to add / update metadata such as the content’s length and format.

Adding entities with an arbitrary type

An entity can be of any type listed in the RO-Crate context. However, only a few of them have a counterpart (e.g., File) in the library’s class hierarchy, either because they are very common or because they are associated with specific functionality that can be conveniently embedded in the class implementation. In other cases, you can explicitly pass the type via the properties argument:

from rocrate.model.contextentity import ContextEntity

hackathon = crate.add(ContextEntity(crate, "#bh2021", properties={
    "@type": "Hackathon",
    "name": "Biohackathon 2021",
    "location": "Barcelona, Spain",
    "startDate": "2021-11-08",
    "endDate": "2021-11-12"
}))

Note that entities can have multiple types, e.g.:

    "@type" = ["File", "SoftwareSourceCode"]

Consuming an RO-Crate

An existing RO-Crate package can be loaded from a directory or zip file:

crate = ROCrate('exp_crate')  # or ROCrate('exp_crate.zip')
for e in crate.get_entities():
    print(e.id, e.type)

./ Dataset
ro-crate-metadata.json CreativeWork
paper.pdf File
results.csv File
images/figure.svg File
https://orcid.org/0000-0000-0000-0000 Person
https://orcid.org/0000-0000-0000-0001 Person
...

The first two entities shown in the output are the root data entity and the metadata file descriptor, respectively. The former represents the whole crate, while the latter represents the metadata file. These are special entities managed by the ROCrate object, and are always present. The other entities are the ones we added in the section on RO-Crate creation. As shown above, get_entities allows to iterate over all entities in the crate. You can also access only data entities with crate.data_entities and only contextual entities with crate.contextual_entities. For instance:

for e in crate.data_entities:
    author = e.get("author")
    if not author:
        continue
    elif isinstance(author, list):
        print(e.id, [p.get("name") for p in author])
    else:
        print(e.id, repr(author.get("name")))

paper.pdf ['Alice Doe', 'Bob Doe']
results.csv 'Alice Doe'
images/figure.svg 'Bob Doe'

You can fetch an entity by its @id as follows:

article = crate.dereference("paper.pdf")  # or crate.get("paper.pdf")

Command Line Interface

Comment: Jupyter Notebook users: switch to a terminal

The code cells in this section use Unix shell commands, which can’t be run within a notebook. Open a Unix/Linux terminal to follow along.

ro-crate-py includes a hierarchical command line interface: the rocrate tool. rocrate is the top-level command, while specific functionalities are provided via sub-commands. Currently, the tool allows to initialize a directory tree as an RO-Crate (rocrate init) and to modify the metadata of an existing RO-Crate (rocrate add).

$ rocrate --help
Usage: rocrate [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

Options:
  --help  Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  add
  init
  write-zip

Crate initialization

The rocrate init command explores a directory tree and generates an RO-Crate metadata file (ro-crate-metadata.json) listing all files and directories as File and Dataset entities, respectively.

$ rocrate init --help
Usage: rocrate init [OPTIONS]

Options:
  --gen-preview
  -e, --exclude CSV
  -c, --crate-dir PATH
  --help                Show this message and exit.

The command acts on the current directory, unless the -c option is specified. The metadata file is added (overwritten if present) to the directory at the top level, turning it into an RO-Crate.

Adding items to the crate

The rocrate add command allows to add files, datasets (directories), workflows, and other entity types (currently testing-related metadata) to an RO-Crate:

$ rocrate add --help
Usage: rocrate add [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

Options:
  --help  Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  dataset
  file
  test-definition
  test-instance
  test-suite
  workflow

Note that data entities (e.g., workflows) must already be present in the directory tree: the effect of the command is to register them in the metadata file.

Example

To run the following commands, we need a copy of the ro-crate-py repository:

git clone https://github.com/ResearchObject/ro-crate-py

Navigate to the following directory in the repository we just cloned:

cd ro-crate-py/test/test-data/ro-crate-galaxy-sortchangecase

This directory is already an RO-Crate. Delete the metadata file to get a plain directory tree:

rm ro-crate-metadata.json

Now the directory tree contains several files and directories, including a Galaxy workflow and a Planemo test file, but it’s not an RO-Crate anymore, since there is no metadata file. Initialize the crate:

rocrate init

This creates an ro-crate-metadata.json file that lists files and directories rooted at the current directory. Note that the Galaxy workflow is listed as a plain File:

{
  "@id": "sort-and-change-case.ga",
  "@type": "File"
}

To register the workflow as a ComputationalWorkflow, run the following:

rocrate add workflow -l galaxy sort-and-change-case.ga

Now the workflow has a type of ["File", "SoftwareSourceCode", "ComputationalWorkflow"] and points to a ComputerLanguage entity that represents the Galaxy workflow language. Also, the workflow is listed as the crate’s mainEntity (this is required by the Workflow RO-Crate profile, a subtype of RO-Crate which provides extra specifications for workflow metadata).

To add files or directories after crate initialization:

cp ../sample_file.txt .
rocrate add file sample_file.txt -P name=sample -P description="Sample file"
cp -r ../test_add_dir .
rocrate add dataset test_add_dir

The above example also shows how to set arbitrary properties for the entity with -P. This is supported by most rocrate add subcommands.