RO-Crate Profile section

[stain]

See issue #153.

This adds a section to explain:

• What is an RO-Crate profile? (borrowed from https://www.researchobject.org/ro-crate/profiles.html)
• How to assign an RO-Crate profile
• How to type a formal RO-Crate profile (e.g. SHACL RDF Shape)
• How to assign profiles to other entities

It does not (yet) detail the suggestions on how to formally specify an RO-Crate profile as a new or adapted expression language.

This proposal have multiple sections we may not want to all include:

• Declaring an RO-Crate profile – expanding conformsTo on Metadata File descriptor
• Which type of profile? – indicating encodingFormat for formal profiles
• Declaring a profile's profile – – being more specific than encodingFormat - specifically to indicate the use of SHACL inside RDF Turtle.
• Declaring an entity's profile – showing how profiles can be applied to other data entities like a Word document
• Declaring an entity's metadata profile – adding a new sdConformsTo to show that the JSON-LD entity conforms
  • Full example with a workflow shows distinction between @type, sdConformsTo, encodingFormat, conformsTo and programmingLanguage
• Combining formal profiles using RO-Crate – suggesting an RO-Crate itself can be a profile to aggregate multiple schemas etc. (not expanded to example)

Now I added all these sections mainly for discussion – I am not convinced we want all of them! And perhaps some should move to data entity section on encoding or at least be linked to from there. XML is a tricky one because there are many declared subformats of XML but even more undeclared ones.

I added sdConformsTo in ro-terms as I realised https://www.researchobject.org/ro-crate/1.1/workflows.html#complying-with-bioschemas-computational-workflow-profile had then wrong use of conformsTo (the Knime file content does not conform!) - this could however be simplified by just lifting those profiles up to also be conformsTo on the ro-crate-metadata.json

[stain]

See also schemaorg/schemaorg#2887 on adding structuredData (this metadata object) and schemaorg/schemaorg#1516 on adding conformsTo to schema.org

[stain]

Following profile taskforce meeting 2021-06-18 it was decided to go for a simpler approach of:

1. RO-Crate profiles are indicated by expanding conformsTo on ro-crate-metadata.json
2. The profile indicated by conformsTo should be a WebPage that gives human readable information
3. The profile MAY optionally also resolve to another RO-Crate, a Profile Crate
4. The Profile Crate will have hasPart whatever schemas, documentation, software are relevant to this profile (but must still have a human-readable description)
5. The Profile Crate is resolved either by Content Negotiation or by adding ./ro-crate-metadata.json to URL.

I have simplified the draft to reflect the above. I have also changed how profile languages are expressed: rather than a nested conformsTo (which may be confusing here), I used encodingFormat URIs as we already suggest for other entities.

[stain]

I also added a suggestion on how to indicate extension vocabularies and JSON-LD contexts.

Here I used http://schema.org/DefinedTermSet and http://schema.org/DefinedTerm which seems quite appropriate - perhaps we should also use those instead of Thing in https://www.researchobject.org/ro-crate/1.1/appendix/jsonld.html#extending-ro-crate ?

[stain]

I tried realizing this as an example from the Workflow RO-Crate profile:

https://about.workflowhub.eu/Workflow-RO-Crate/ro-crate-preview.html

Notice how this was retrofitted to the old URL https://about.workflowhub.eu/Workflow-RO-Crate/ without change – ideally this should of course also be versioned and so on.

Example shows most of the features, and adds a list of licenses that Workflow Hub expects.

[stain]

Agreed (somewhat) in RO-Crate community call 2021-07-08 to merge as-is for 1.2-DRAFT, but also:

• Add diagram
• Explore further semantics, inheritance, templates and MUST/SHOULD/MAY requirements

[marc-portier]

@stain - with some minor suggestions (scrible? expectations? format?) I could throw up a first draft for that diagram ...

[stain]

Thanks, Marc!

For the diagram, perhaps something like:

Example RO-Crate —conformsTo→ PID —redirect→ WFRun ProfileCrate —hasPart→ 
    - profile-for-describo.json —encodingFormat→ DescriboJSONProfile
    - ComputationalWorkflow
    - licenses/

but using some icons. Also not sure if the ProfileCrate itself should say it is a profile crate (conformsTo: https://www.researchobject.org/ro-crate/1.2-DRAFT/profiles.html or so?) or if that becomes a bit too much turtles all the way – at least explanation wise!

See https://about.workflowhub.eu/Workflow-RO-Crate/ro-crate-preview.html and https://about.workflowhub.eu/Workflow-RO-Crate/example/ as example.