[okfn-labs] CSV and Datapackage Validation projects at the ODI

Mon Jan 27 09:52:30 UTC 2014

Hi,

The ODI tech team has been working on some validation tools to support
people in publishing and sharing CSV files and Data Packages. I'm
sending this email to share some pointers to the work and to request
some feedback from the labs community.

We've looked at various tools/approaching for validating CSV files,
exploring what features tools provide, their syntax, etc. There is
some documentation and examples here:

https://github.com/theodi/csv-validation-research

There's also a proposal that summarises some specific improvements to
the CSV DDF and JSON Table Schema specifications to support additional
validation use cases:

https://github.com/theodi/csv-validation-research/wiki/Extending-Data-Packages-to-Support-CSV-File-Validation

Based on this we've also been creating some validation tools. Here are
the early versions of our DataPackage and CSV validation libraries:

https://github.com/theodi/datapackage.rb
https://github.com/theodi/csvlint.rb

The CSV validator is being used to create a validation service:

https://github.com/theodi/csvlint
http://csvlint.io/

These are still very much works in progress, but we'd love to get
feedback from the community, particularly around features for the CSV
validation tools.

To help move forward discussion around some of the suggested
improvements to CSV DDF and JSON Table I plan on opening some tickets
on the relevant projects in github.

Cheers,

L.

-- 
Leigh Dodds
Freelance Technologist
Open Data, Linked Data Geek
t: @ldodds
w: ldodds.com
e: leigh at ldodds.com