FAIR metadata html page generator
A simple Python script to generate a static HTML page for viewing a JSON-LD metadata description of a dataset using Schema.org markup vocabulary.
Structured, machine-readable metadata about datasets are helpful for improving the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability of data. Google, for example, is gradually developing support for dataset search tools to help researchers find and reuse relevant data. Providing machine-readable descriptions of datasets is helpful for search engine indexing software to process and display data descriptions to users.
I have developed a Python script here to generate such a description in JSON-LD using Schema.org markup vocabulary.
However, after this JSON-LD description is generated, it is often useful to publish a webpage describing the content of the JSON-LD file for viewing by humans. Given an input JSON-LD file describing a dataset, the script jsonld_to_html.py generates a single static HTML page accomplishing this.
- Python 3.7+
- Python libraries specified in
requirements.txtin this repository - A JSON-LD file compliant with the Schema.org Dataset entity description. If you do not have one of these files at hand, you can generate one using this tool. Alternatively, there is an example file under
testdata/inputdata/in this repository.
To install the required libraries in requirements.txt run: pip install -r requirements.txt in your command line environment (after installing Python).
Run python jsonld_to_html.py <relative path to input json-ld file> <relative path to output html file> in your command line environment after installing Python and the required libraries. For example: python jsonld_to_html.py testdata/inputdata/test.jsonld testdata/outputdata/test.html
This tool makes use of the Jinja templating engine for Python. I have defined an HTML template templates/html_template.html in this repository. If you would like to customise your HTML files for viewing the JSON-LD metadata, you can modify this template or add new custom templates in this folder. You would then need to update references to this template file in jsonld_to_html.py and also make necessary modifications to the mappings/jsonld_to_htmltemplate_mapping.csv file. This file defines a mapping between JSON-LD keys for Schema.org datasets and the Jinja variables (in the HTML template file) that should hold the values for these keys. I plan to include the mapping file and the HTML template as arguments for the json_to_html.py script in the near future.
The styling of the output HTML page(s) is defined in the style.css CSS file located in testdata/outputdata/. If you prefer a different styling, this is the file to modify. The output HTML files also expect the CSS file to be located in a folder called css/ in the same directory as the output HTML file(s).
The FAIR metadata html page generator is copyrighted by Kody Moodley and released under the GNU Affero License
Contributions and bug reports are helpful and welcome.