POWDER Validator

Validate by URI

This tool is still under construction but is functionally complete. It provides reasonable validation for documents written in accordance with the latest documents available from the Working Group homepage.

This tool is not endorsed by the POWDER Working group or wider W3C membership, however, it is hoped to move it to validator.w3.org before the end of 2008. The source code will be published and is available now on request (I’m working on it actively so I’m taking a shortcut here and not maintaining the published code as I go).

The validator’s ability to transform a POWDER document into POWDER-BASE is also available as a separate tool at http://keg.icra.org/cgi-bin/pdr_to_base.cgi. It takes the following paramters (by HTTP GET or POST):

uri

The URI of a POWDER document to be validated and transformed

powder

The content of a POWDER document

The tool returns either a POWDER-BASE document (if it is valid) or an error message as RDF/XML. In the latter case, the same error code scheme is used as for a POWDER Processor, i.e. 1xx means there’s an error in the data, 2xx means there’s an error in the processor.

This POWDER to POWDER-BASE transformation script needs more testing but is essentially complete.

Version 0.7
I’m developing this on the live site for now so if you get an odd error, don’t be surprised, it means I’m working on it right now. If you detect a bug especially a POWDER doc that should be reported as valid that isn’t (or vice versa), please let me know.

To Do

  • More testing, hardening etc.
  • Tidying up the code and publishing it. If you’d like a copy of the code soponer rather than later, please let me know.
  • Documentation (don’t expect that any time soon!) In brief: this is a Perl script that uses XML::Parser and XML::XPath. Sadly it doesn’t use a validating parser and grab the POWDER XML Schema (that would require more programming skill than I have. If someone would like to help me out with Xerces – I’m all ears!

Phil Archer, 15 December 2008.