tuw-rocrate-automation

Convert RO-Crate (Research Object Crate)¹ InvenioRDM's bibliographic records and upload it to a RDM (Research Data Management) instance. RO-Crates may include additional files like images that will be uploaded as well.

Supported metadata

Due to the structure of RO-Crates not all relevant fields can be extracted. Some fields are provided via the config file instead. Other information is at least partially available but cannot be added due to missing fields that are mandatory in the RDM with no wildcard value. The following list includes all fields supported by the RDM. Strikethrough entries are not supported with a reason in parentheses.

• resource_type (via config; multiple formats not supported)
• creators
• title
• publication_date
• additional_titles
• description
• additional_descriptions
• rights
• contributors (role not included)
• subjects
• languages (unsupported)
• dates
• version (not included)
• publisher (via config; missing)²
• identifiers
• related_identifiers (relation_types not included)
• funding (missing)³

Removed fields that are not part of the deposit page yet. Missing is documented as SHOULD (RFC 2119) but practicly not in use. Reasons and links to related documentation is provided in the corresponding place in the code.

Setup

• Create personal API token for the TU Wien Research Data API at https://test.researchdata.tuwien.ac.at/account/settings/applications/ (Test instance)
• Install Python dependencies:

python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Basic Usage

python tuw_rocrate_upload.py -h
usage: TUW RDM RO-Crate Upload [-h] [-u URL] [-t TOKEN] [-p] path                                                                                     
                                                                                                                                                      
Deposit your RO-Crate metadata and referenced files into the TU Wien Research Data Repository.                                                                                  
                                                                                                                                                      
positional arguments:                                                                                                                                 
  path                  Relative or absolute path to directory containing ro-crate.metadata.json file. Referenced files must be in the same directory.
                                                                                                                                                      
options:                                                                                                                                              
  -h, --help              show this help message and exit                                                                                               
  -u URL, --url URL       URL to the RDM API                                                                                                            
  -t TOKEN, --token       Bearer token for API authentication                                                                                           
  -p, --publish           Publish the drafted record on the RDM Repository

Some arguments have fallback default values stored in config.ini.

Potential issues, Implementation challenges

Due to the differing natures of the RO-Crate and DataCite standards, the resulting mapping allows only for a subset of the fields used by the TUW RDM Repository to be filled automatically. Some metadata fields that cannot be filled automatically, as denoted in section "supported Metadata".

For other fields, certain assumptions had to be made:

• family_name, given_name: DataCite has separate attributes for the given and last name of a creator or other contributor whereas RO-Crate does not enforce separated family and given names. In order to fill these two fields in the RDM API, we split the RO-Crate name attribute by spaces and use the last part as the family name with the rest serving as given name.

Test Upload

We use the RO-Crate from ./test/sample-rocrates/19f2cf29-c1c7-4abc-8443-354e7698bc86/ as a demonstrative upload. In this case, we directly publish the record using the --publish flag. In normal operation, it is advisable to publish manually using the Web Portal after checking the metadata and filling out potentially missing values.

python tuw_rocrate_upload.py test/sample-rocrates/b97348a7-991f-46cf-9834-cf602bacf800 --token <your-token> --url https://test.researchdata.tuwien.ac.at/api/ --publish

If you want to reproduce this test call, replace with your personal API token. The published record is immediately visible in the research data portal, including the files referenced in the RO-Crate: https://test.researchdata.tuwien.ac.at/records/fqgr5-zs043.

Footnotes

1. The script assumes the RO-Crate schema used by RoHub ↩

2. https://www.researchobject.org/ro-crate/1.1/contextual-entities.html#publisher ↩

3. https://www.researchobject.org/ro-crate/1.1/contextual-entities.html#funding-and-grants ↩