The work of the registry working group can be summed up rather quickly. Use existing vocabularies like schema.org and re3data terms to expose facility metadata using web architecture patterns. Leverage HTML5 microdata publishing, JSON-LD and standard web architecture (hypermedia) to both expose and collect metadata.
The EarthCube Council of Data Facilities (CDF) formed the Registry Working Group to review alignment of existing approaches to research facility description and discovery. The involved parties include the EarthCube CDF, Coalition for Publishing Data in the Earth and Space Sciences (COPDESS) and the Registry of Research Data Repositories (re3data).
<script type="application/ld+json">
After reading in the JSON-LD it could be converted to RDF for a triple store
or other data storage or index approaches used by a harvesting group.
There is no blessed harvesting or presentation site. Any number of groups or organizations
could harvest and provide access to this material.
The following image gives a brief overview of how facilities might take their descriptor documents and metadata and expose this material up through a workflow to aggregation and interface clients.
As noted a test crawler, harvester and indexer is being developed at contextBuilder. This is a simple (and not production ready) application for harvesting from a whitelist and extracting the JSON-LD package. The next step will be to convert this JSON-LD to triples and moved into a standard triple store. A focused JSON-LD crawler is also in development at https://github.com/ESIPFed/snapHacks/tree/master/sh01-jsonldCrawl
The registryC5 file is testing some external vocabulary uses. It is valid JSON-LD but Google will always through an error since it doesn't see this as a property of some known schema.org class. This should be fine and I have tested this, but it is always a worry with Google that you will not know when how they deal with this case will be changed. Their typical response has been, "try and get things you need in core schema.org".