VOTE: Proposal for RO-Crate 1.3

[elichad]

Please use this issue only for voting, procedural matters, or overall comments - place issue-specific comments in the linked issues/PRs to keep those conversations together.

Proposal

Make an RO-Crate 1.3 release which is almost the same as RO-Crate 1.2 except for the following changes:

Notable changes (the reason it's proposed as 1.3 and not 1.2.1):

• Update RO-Crate context to use canonical Bioschemas prefix ro-crate#542 (update to the context affecting workflow use cases, see discussion in Use canonical Bioschemas prefix ro-crate#529)

Additional minor changes (most of which were already merged into 1.2 post-release, but we never formally released a 1.2.1, so they are here for completeness):

• Converting to detached: metadata descriptor must be ro-crate-metadata.json ro-crate#538 (fixing error in the appendix Detached crate example in the spec is not valid ro-crate#524)
• Fix incorrect links in spec index ro-crate#505 (fixes typo)
• Resolve #527: Changes Place example key to url ro-crate#528 (fixes typo)
• Add page descriptions/excerpts to improve page previews and SEO ro-crate#499 (improves page metadata for the website rendering, no content changed)
• Ensure all our rdfs: properties are defined in core RO-Crate profile ro-crate#471 (adds missing rdfs: properties to Profile Crate)

If the vote passes, the release will be made shortly after (within a few weeks).

Voting

Steering committee members as of 2026-05-29 to vote are:

• @ptsefton Peter (PT) Sefton
• @stain Stian Soiland-Reyes
• @CaroleGoble Carole Goble
• @RudoWittner Rudolf Wittner
• @spikelynch Mike Lynch
• @rapw3k Raul Palma
• @dgarijo Daniel Garijo
• @elichad Eli Chadwick
• @mpo-vliz Marc Portier
• @a-mile Abigail Miller
• @joshmoore Josh Moore

Anyone in the RO-Crate community is welcome to flag an issue with the proposal. There will be scheduled time for discussion at the Steering committee meeting 2026-06-24 19:00 UTC, after which voting will begin. The vote passes if a majority of the steering committee has voted positively by Sunday 14 June 23:59 UTC (voting period extended so anyone who misses the steering committee meeting has time to catch up on the discussion & vote).

For transparency, track your vote in this GitHub issue (e.g. by reply to the email or use of the emoji vote). You may place a blank vote if you are not sure, but please raise a comment in the discussion for anything to clarify.

[PS I got to making this issue later than I wanted to - interested to hear if this is/is not considered "reasonable notice" for a vote]

[elichad]

8 votes in favour received at the SC meeting 2026-06-04 (PT, Stian, Carole, Rudolf, Mike, Eli, Abigail, Josh)

[elichad]

Vote has passed - 9 in favour, 0 against, 2 no vote

[dgarijo]

Thanks for pushing this forward.
I did not have time to review the changes, and therefore I did not vote. Having looked briefly over the files, I have one question: doesn't the bioschemas name change affect also the wfrrun profile: https://www.researchobject.org/workflow-run-crate/profiles/workflow_run_crate/ ?
The other changes make sense to me, so please count this as my +1

[elichad]

@dgarijo Yes, this is the main impact of the change, and it's intended.

It arose from discussion here when updating WRROC for RO-Crate 1.2 (unreleased) as a couple of the terms changed there: ResearchObject/workflow-run-crate#101 (comment). And then the WorkflowHub team flagged that Bioschemas had changed their namespace upstream ResearchObject/ro-crate#529. As the WROC/WRROC profiles don't officially support 1.2 yet, we decided it would be better to update the terms to their permanent URIs now as a 1.3 release, and make a WROC & WRROC release that supports these changes (i.e. skipping support for 1.2). Otherwise we would have to update the profiles twice and create extra work keeping track of old & new term URIs for platforms that want to be backward compatible

[dgarijo]

Makes sense!