ro-crate-to-datasette

Experimental repository for exploring RO-Crates as tabular data.

• Generates three tables:

  • properties: a general-purpose triple-store style table which contains all of the triples from the crate, but with some additional columns for convenience
  • entities: a helper table to to summarize an entity with name, id and a few other fielrs
  • root: A single-entry table pointing to the root data entity
  • Optional: Using a config file ( which is generated for you on first run) specify which tables you would like created with a row per entity of that @type - this allows you to also join in data directly and to hide fields you don't want -- doco not done yet but see the cooee example this will also pull-in indexable-text if that is present on an entity

• Starts Datasette

The indexer script is currently a stand alone Python script but it could be packaged as a Datasette plugin that can read RO-Crates natively.

Why?

This experiment is to explore

• whether it makes sense to use Datasette (or just sqlite) with a simple front end to host small to medium collections of data without need ing a server
• As a tool for data managers and researchers to crate custom tabular views of RO-Crate data collections

Todo

The initial proof of concept works but there are things to do.

• Add full-text indexing
• Add some browse pages
• "Librify" (Tom Honeyman's term) so it can be included in notebooks or other workflows

Installation (Macos)

• Make a virtual environment locally: python3 -m venv venv
• Activate the virtual environment . venv/bin/activate
• Install pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Usage

There's a sample dataset included which should serve as an example of usage:

make sample

Load http://localhost:8001/browse/entity in your browser.

Example: COOEE corpus

There is a copy of the COOEE corpus as an RO-Crate in test_data/cooee

To create a sqlite database with table for RepositoryObject and Person data

make cooee

Try out making a tabular view which joins speaker data with other metadata and full text using a Datasette Custom SQL Query:

SELECT *
FROM Person 
JOIN RepositoryObject
on Person."@id" = RepositoryObject.author_id