The ARC RO-Crate profile aims to extend basic RO-Crate by elevating it from merely documenting research objects to providing a full, interconnected representation of the research process, from data generation to analysis, making it a powerful tool for tracing and reproducing scientific investigations.
In its core, the ARC-profile consists of detailed descriptions of the processes that lead to the generation of the data. For this, the LabProcess type is used, connecting inputs with outputs and parametrization of the steps. By carefully annotating the dataset using these processes, a complete process graph can be modeled. Consumers of the dataset can understand properties about the annotated data entities by traversing this process graph.
On top of the generic LabProcess, the ARC-profile implements the ISA-profile for annotation of biological workflows and the ARC-CWL-profile for annotation of computational workflows. Both of these profiles are tied together in the ARC profile by the shared usage of the LabProcess:
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ISA (Investigation, Study, Assay) is a widely used metadata model for annotation of biological experiments.
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CWL (Common Workflow Language) is a description model for specifying how to run and orchestrate command line tools and other executables
