What is it?
Roteva (also spelled as ROTEVA, from contemporary Finnish: 'RajOiTEVAlidaattori' [constraint validator], meaning 'solid in structure', or 'of firm build', 'sturdy') is a comprehensive open-source linked data validator designed especially for detecting and repairing corrupted linked data. Its main features include (but are not limited to):
- Capability to iteratively build-validate-repair a dataset
- User assisted generation of SHACL shapes
- Visualization of SHACL validation reports
- Seamless inspection of violations and warnings of rules (constraints) between report and dataset
- Downloading of generated reports and datasets
Please see Documentation for more information on how to use this software.
Technologies behind the software
Roteva is a Java-based Play application with a high focus on web interface. The web interface is built on top of multiple libraries, including jQuery (interactions), Slickgrid (grids) and N3.js (RDF handling). For a complete list of ECMAScript (JavaScript) libraries used, please see app/views/main.scala.html from the repository or view the page source code.
Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL), as a suitable RDF-based linked data constraint language, was selected as the constraint language of choice for this software. The open-sourced, SHACL validation engine of choice is currently TopBraid SHACL API, which on the other hand depends on the widely known and recognized Apache JENA framework.
About the project
Roteva was originally developed in Semantic Computing Research Group at Aalto University as part of the Linked Open Data Science Service project by Alex Kourijoki as part of his Master's Thesis 'Validation and Correction of Linked Data' (in Finnish), 2020. The project was funded by the Ministry of Education and Culture and is part of the national Open Science and Research initiative.