SWValidators

Status and possible plans for Semantic Web related validators

This page tries to collect

• what the current situation is with SW related validators
• what could be added with a reasonable amount of work

The page was created after Semantic Web Coordination Group discussions, noting that the current RDF validator has not been actively developed for several years. While it is functional and serves a basic purpose, there is always the potential for improvements. Meanwhile, the RDF family of W3C standards has grown; we now have a query language (SPARQL), also based on RDF patterns; a powerful ontology language (OWL), rules framework (RIF) and more options for encoding RDF data (GRDDL, Turtle etc). For newcomers, this range of standards can be daunting. The use of online checkers and validators can be a valuable part of learning a new technology, and there are a range of validation tools on offer at W3C and elsewhere.

Please don't hesitate to edit this page with links to other tools that check conformance to W3C Semantic Web standards, or which help developers and software check conformance of RDF/OWL etc data to particular application needs. If you have wishlist items or feedback experience from using the existing tools (including the graphic visualisation component of the RDF Validator, the HTML validator and others) please record them here or in a mail to www-rdf-validator@w3.org.

Current validators (listed on this site)

• W3C (X)HTML Validator
• SPARQLer

What can be added

• RDF Validator in Turtle
• SPARQL pattern validator
• finalize the SKOS and RIF validators
• RDFa validator
• Link RDFa/XHTML, GRDDL and other parsers to the GraphViz display tool

Related Links

The following links relate more to the checking of instance data against various pragmatic constraints, rather than simple binary “s it a valid use of the W3C standard” checkers such as those listed above.

• Schemarama experiments; essentially Schematron over RDF pattern matches. Squish version by Libby Miller, SPARQL version by Alistair Miles.
• Rosco (an 'easy going' FOAF checker)
• Dublin Core Description Set Profiles ('a constraint language for Dublin Core')
• Validating RDF with Treehugger and Schematron (Damian Steer and Libby Miller)
• CheckRDF and Schemarama revisited (Dan Brickley)
• Using OWL for Forms, Validation, and Application Profiles for RDF, Damian Steer.
• Integrity Constraints for OWL, by Evren Sirin of ClarkParsia.
• Weaving the Pedantic Web Aidan Hogan, Andreas Harth, Alexandre Passant, Stefan Decker, Axel Polleres. Technical Report, 2009. Describes RDFAlerts.
• Any23 - a Web service that extracts structured data in RDF from input in RDF/XML, Turtle, Notation 3, RDFa, and various microformats.
• Rapper - RDF parser and serializer that emits results in a choice of syntaxes.
• GoodRelations Validator - a tool that helps you to check your product and company meta-data based on the GoodRelations Web Vocabulary for E-Commerce.