We are pleased to announce the release of a DCAT-AP validator,  which checks metadata description of datasets for integrity and consistency against the DCAT-AP specification.

The DCAT-AP validator is funded by Open Data Support under SMART 2012/0107 ‘Lot 2: Provision of services for the Publication, Access and Reuse of Open Public Data across the European Union, through existing open data portals’(Contract No. 30-CE-0530965/00-17).

The validator allows you to validate a DCAT-AP metadata file by means of a file upload, a URI, or a direct input.
Your DCAT-AP metadata file can be expressed in different formats: Turtle, RDF/XML, N-triples and JSON-LD.

The validator uses Apache Jena Fuseki 1.1.2 as SPARQL server to store the uploaded file as graph.

The validator generates as output a table with all the errors and warnings related to the violated rules coming from the DCAT-AP specification.
You can choose different types of output: XML (default), JSON, Text, CSV and TSV.

When the output is XML, which is displayed by the browser as HTML,  the user can navigate to:
the details of the rule violated;
the tabular representation of a class or property as extracted by the SPARQL server.

The DCAT-AP validator is released as open source software under the EUPL 1.1 licence.

If you have any comments or feedback, or you just want to collaborate to the development of the project, you are more than welcome to contact us on the home page of the DCAT-AP validator on Joinup.