TestSystem

= ARIADNE Validation Service =

During several years of harvesting metadata throughout several federations, it became clear that there was a need for an easy way of validating metadata against an agreed upon Application Profile (AP), as manual checking got increasingly time consuming with the gorwing number of repositories and amounts of metadata. The validation service uses a set of validation rules that are bundled into a validation scheme to validate against an AP. Through the use of modular components the validation service is very reusable & extendable, as you can see in the figure below.



Online Validation Service
The ARIADNE Online validation service is an online version of the validation service which is intended can be used in the very early stages of the workflow, from the mapping process onwards.

First a validation scheme has to be selected, which will activate the necessary validation components on the metadata.

In the case of ASPECT related metadata you can select between ASPECTv1.0/core and ASPECTv1.0/recommended, where the latter is more restrictive. After pasting the metadata record and pressing "validate" you will get a small report explaining which parts of the metadata can be improved to be compliant to the ASPECT application profile.

Stand alone Validation Service
The validation service is also available as a set of java libraries, with an easy to use API, which is explained in the figure below.

These libraries will be available on sourceforge in the near future, but until then you can contact us, if you want to use the libraries to integrate into our own application.



Integration in ARIADNE Harvester
For an easy validation workflow during harvesting, the validation service has already been integrated into the ARIADNE Harvester. More information about this can be found here : ARIADNE Harvester

Related material
Slides are available here :

= ASPECT Test System =

The ASPECT Test System allows to test xml files for compliance with the “Learning Resource Exchange Metadata Application Profile Version 4.5”.

Please download here the version appropriate for your operating system and unzip it. The unzipped directory will contain at the top level the test system which you launch using a current Java Runtime Environment. After launching the test system, determine in the Configuration tab the directory where the reports should be saved. At the Test Packages tab Add the instance documents you intend to Validate. For more information, please see the Aspect Deliverable 3.2.1.