First DCAT validator in the world

Hello DCAT-users,

We are two students working on the DCAT-project for open Summer of code
2015. The project is about creating the first DCAT validator, which gives
you feedback, telling you whether your DCAT feed is valid or not. This
project is organised by Open Knowledge Belgium and funded by the Flemish
government.


The intention of the DCAT validator is to show the user errors or wanings
when respectively mandatory or required properties are missing. The
validation can easily be done by manually inserting the feed, uploading a
file or inserting a URI. Through the use of different tabs you can change
the way you insert your feed. As a user you can also select and insert
different formats like RDF:XML, JSON-LD and Turtle. These formats are
supported by the validator as well. The validator will parse these formats
and serialize them as Turtle so they can be validated. Once you have
selected your format you can add your feed to the validator.

After validation, your errors and warnings are presented. To find more
information about the error or warning you can expand the box which will
show you what properties are wrong or missing. Each property can be
expanded as well to show a property URI which will direct the user to a
page which contains more information about the property. As an extra
feature, when inserting a URI, the user can select the option 'Automatic'
instead of selecting a format. This option checks which format your URI
contains, automatically selects the right parser and validates it. This way
the user doesn't have to select a format when he wants to validate by URI.
Selecting a format and inserting your DCAT feed is very easy and doesn't
take long, depending on the size of your feed.

In short, this is the first DCAT validator which helps you as a user to
check if your DCAT feed is valid or not. It contains a few features to help
insert different formats and validate them. The errors and warnings are
shown and can be expanded for more information about its properties.


You can test the validator right here: www.dcat.be/validator

Kind regards

The DCAT-validator team.

Stan Callewaert
e-mail: callewaert.stan@gmail.com
Sébastien Henau
e-mail: sebastienhenau@hotmail.com