📦 NovaCrate

Web-based fully-featured interactive editor for creating, editing and visualising research object crates.

▶️ Open NovaCrate

🎨 Editions

NovaCrate can be used and deployed in multiple different ways. Currently, the following editions (conceptually) exist:

💡 If you have a special interest in the Desktop App or the Cloud Frontend, please get in contact.

ℹ️ How To: Custom Backend

NovaCrate is a frontend that can be used for any backend that hosts RO-Crates (an appropriate backend adapter must be implemented). This could be anything in the range from a simple file storage to a full REST Service for manipulating crates. See src/lib/backend/CrateServiceAdapter.ts for a list of methods that a backend adapter should implement. All of these methods can make use of backend resources or be suplemented locally.

NovaCrate currently does not include mechanisms for authentication, access control or concurrent access.

📊 Roadmap

• ✅ Create, read and edit RO-Crates
• ✅ Visualize RO-Crates with a graph
• ✅ Focused on usability and a modern architecture
• ✅ Context-information and property descriptions
• ✅ Automatic recommendation of fitting entity types and properties
• ✅ Support for RO-Crate Specification v1.1
• ✅ Support for importing and exporting the ELN format
• ✅ Easily extendable with custom schemas
• ✅ Generate and view HTML preview file
• ❌ Validation of RO-Crates (limited validation available in HTML preview file)
• ❌ Support for RO-Crate Profiles

👨‍💻 Development

Prerequisites

• Install Node.js >= 20
• Clone the NovaCrate repository

Quickstart

Once the prerequisites are met, run the following code to get started quickly:

npm install
npm run dev

Updating dependencies

This step might be necessary after fetching new commits and on the first installation.

npm install

Development

This command starts NovaCrate in development mode. This enabled hot reload, but also increases response time

npm run dev

Open http://localhost:3000 with your browser to see the result.

Building

This command builds NovaCrate in the out folder.

npm run build

The website can then be found in the out folder. Use any web server for viewing. Local viewing:

npx serve@latest out

🎓 Thesis

This project was first created as part of a bachelor thesis

ℹ️ Structure

Most of the structure of the editor and many implementation and design details are outlined in the bachelor thesis.

To summarize: This is a Next.js app. Pages are located in /app, components in /components and anything else is probably in /lib.

📸 Screenshots

Note: These screenshots are out of date.