RO-Crate Profile Registry (planned)

The RO-Crate specification already supports the concept of profiles, defined as:

“a set of conventions, types and properties that one can minimally require and expect to be present in that subset of RO-Crates.”

It also introduces the idea of a Profile Crate, described as:

“a type of RO-Crate that represents an RO-Crate profile. It gathers resources which further define the profile in addition to the profile description. This allows formalizing an alternative profile description for machine-readability (for instance for validation), and also additional resources like examples.”

Existing profiles already cover a range of use cases such as  Electronic Notebooks, Workflow Runs. However, these profiles are currently scattered across GitHub repositories and other online locations, expressed in diverse formats including JSON Schema, SHACL, Crate-O mode files, Describo profiles, or simply in plain human-readable documentation. This fragmentation makes discovery, reuse, interoperability, and validation more difficult.

We propose the development of a dedicated RO-Crate Profile Registry, a unified platform for authoring, maintaining, discovering, and sharing RO-Crate profiles. Profiles registered here would be available in both human-readable and machine-actionable forms.

In addition, the registry will support cross-walks between profiles, enabling interoperability between systems that implement different RO-Crate conventions. Such mappings would allow RO-Crates authored under one profile to be translated into another, making profiles more reusable, easier to integrate, and more robust across tools and domains.