Define a file extension for zipped RO-Crates

[elichad]

Idea that came out of some RO-Crate discussions at Manchester.

If an "official" file extension was determined for zipped RO-Crates - e.g. .rocrate, .rocx, .rocrate.zip - it could aid RO-Crate consumption. For example:

• tools that want an RO-Crate upload (e.g. WorkflowHub workflow upload page) can check the extension to see if the user has uploaded a crate and not a different zip file
• data repositories that accept generic data uploads could detect RO-Crates and choose to unzip them to extract metadata (e.g. Zenodo could extract information about authors from an uploaded crate)
• if/when a desktop app RO-Crate viewer is developed, it could be set as the default app for opening data with that file extension

A couple of services have already implemented their own extension:

• WorkflowHub exports crates as .crate.zip
• Galaxy exports crates as .rocrate.zip

I've described this only for zipped RO-Crates because I'm not sure it makes sense to do the same thing for non-zipped attached crates (as they're a whole directory) or for detached crates.

[jmfernandez]

I guess this issue is assuming that it is a "native" zipped RO-Crate, instead of an RO-Crate within a zipped BagIt, isn't it?

[elichad]

@jmfernandez yes that's correct.