Detailed description of the service 

Quite often, data needs to have a well-defined container in order to enhance interoperability.  RO-Crate is a mature solution for this need.  In addition to rich metadata, RO-Crates also contain the raw data.  This way, users of the container gain access to data of all stages of the scientific workflow.  Not only seamless re-use is enabled by this, but also reliable examination and check for reproducability.

SM4RO-C [1] (“SciMesh 4 RO-Crates”) provides a way to embed SciMesh [3] graphs into an RO-Crate container to produce self-contained artefacts of scientific results and insights, together with their context, provenance, and bulk data.

Fig. [SM4RO-C] shows the technology stack of SM4RO-C.  Its three pillars are TheELNFileFormat [2] and SciMesh.  TheELNFileFOrmat in turn is a specialised RO-Crate as a ZIP file, an RO-Crate “profile”.  In a future version of SM4RO-C, we plan to add minor enhancements that let it look like an EPUB if opened with e-reader software. You might think of SM4RO-C containers as heavily enriched, highly-structured, machine-actionable ZIP files.

Researchers can use SM4RO-C containers to share well-defined research data objects, e.g. all data of a semiconductor device, with peer researchers. Electronic lab notebooks can use SM4RO-C to exchange data between different ELNs, or to export their data to disk for backup or migration purposes. Moreover, SM4RO-C containers are suitable for effective publication of research results.