Database of Requirements on RDF Validation: http://purl.org/net/rdf-validation

Hi all,

I'm new to this mailing list and I would like to indoduce myself.
My name is Thomas Bosch and I'm a PhD student in Computer Science in my fourth year now.

I'm part of the editorial board of the DCMI RDF Application Profiles Task Group [1],
whose preliminary fields of work are (1) RDF Constraint Specification and Validation, (2) Definition of an RDF Application Profile, and (3) Request handling for RDF APs and data.

Together with Kai Eckert (University of Mannheim), we created a database of requirements on RDF constraint formulation and validation, which is publicly accessable via
http://purl.org/net/rdf-validation
and extensible by the community.

During the last half year, we identified more than 180 requirements on RDF validation.
Sources have been (1) the 2013 W3C RDF Validation Workshop, (2) your valuable mailing list discussions, (3) the 2013 Semantic Web in Libraries conference,
(4) discussions in the RDF Application Profiles Task Group, and (5) diverse research papers.

The idea of this extensible database is
(1) to collect and describe case studies from experts (from theory and practice dealing with RDF validation problems) and the general public,
(2) to extract common use cases from these case studies that illustrate particular problems,
(3) to specify requirements to be fulfilled in order to adequately solve these problems and meet the use cases,
(4) to investigate existing best-practices regarding these requirements, and
(5) to evaluate existing approaches / tools to which extend specific requirements are fulfilled.

Using this approach, we try to structure the requirements engineering process for RDF validation.
I see that there is currently a lot of discussion about requirements on RDF validation on this maling list, which I tried to capture in the requirements DB as well.

The contributors of the DCMI RDF Application Profiles Task Group are currently adding further case studies, use cases, requirements, and relationships between these entities to the database.
This should be a work done for and from the community dealing with RDF validation issues.

The full source code of the system and the database with the current state of all requirements is also available:
https://github.com/kaiec/reqbase
You can easily set up a local version for own developments.

Do you think this is the right way to go?
Do you have further ideas?

We hope this kind of contribution could be helpful for the community.

Thank you very much and I really enjoy the valuable discussions on the mailing list


Cheers,
Thomas

[1] http://wiki.dublincore.org/index.php/RDF-Application-Profiles

--
Thomas Bosch, M.Sc. (TUM)
PhD Student
GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences
Social Science Metadata Standards
Visitors Address: B2,1, D-68159 Mannheim
Postal Address: P.O.Box 12 21 55, D-68072 Mannheim
Tel: + 49 (0) 621 / 1246-271
Fax: + 49 (0) 621 / 1246-100
Web: http://www.gesis.org
Website: http://boschthomas.blogspot.com/
GitHub: https://github.com/boschthomas/PhD