RO-Crate Tabulator

Python library to turn an RO-Crate into tabular formats.

Installation

Install uv, then

> git clone git@github.com:Sydney-Informatics-Hub/rocrate-tabular.git
> cd rocrate-tabular
> uv run tabulator --help

uv run should create a local venv and install the dependencies

Usage

First pass: this will scan an RO-Crate directory, build a properties table in the sqlite database crate.db, and generate a config file with a list of all available tables in the potential_tables section

> uv run tabulator -c config.json ./path/to/crate crate.db

You can then edit the config file and move the tables you want to create in the database and/or csv to the tables section, and re-run the tabulator

> uv run tabulator -c config.json ./path/to/crate crate.db

To export a CSV version of any of the tables, you can define a filename / query pair in the "export queries" section of the config file, for example:

{
    "export_queries": {
        "repo_objects.csv": "SELECT * FROM RepositoryObject"
    },
    "tables": {
        "RepositoryObject": {
            "all_props": [ ... ],
            "ignore_props": [ ... ],
            "expand_props": [ ... ]                
        }
    }
}

Expanded properties

The "expand_props" field in a table's config can be used to tell the tabulator to try to follow references from a particular property and bring the values from linked entities into the primary table as columns. For example, here is a fragment of an RO-Crate with a CreativeWork and a Person who is its author:

{
    "@id": "#a_creative_work",
    "@type": "CreativeWork",
    "name": "A Creative Work",
    "description": "A creative work", 
    "author": { "@id": "#jane_smith" }
},
{   
    "@id": "#jane_smith",
    "@type": "Person",
    "name": "Jane Smith"
}

If "author" is in "expand_props" on the "CreativeWork" entry in the "tables" section of the config, the following additional columns will be created in the CreativeWork table:

author_@id
author_@type
author_name

Ignored properties

Properties in the "ignore_props" section will not be added to the tables, and will also be ignored when looking up expanded properties.