Google Summer of Code 2008 approaches its end, as less than forty-eight hours are left to submit the code that will then be evaluated by mentors, therefore it is fitting to pause for a moment and sum up the work that has been done with regard to the license-oriented metadata validator and viewer and to confront it with the original proposal for the project.

A Web application capable of parsing and displaying license information embedded in both well-formed and ill-formed Web pages has been developed. It supports the following means of embedding license information: Dublin Core metadata, RDFa, RDF/XML linked externally or embedded (utilising the data URL scheme) using the link and a elements, and RDF/XML embedded in a comment or as an element (the last two being deprecated). This functionality has been proven by unit testing. The source code of a Web page can be uploaded or pasted by a user, there is also a possibility to provide a URI for the Web application to analyse it. The software has been written in Python and uses the Pylons Web Framework and the Genshi toolkit. Should you be willing to test this Lynx-friendly application, please visit its Web site.

The Web application itself uses a library called “libvalidator”, which in turn is powered by cc.license (a library developed by Creative Commons that returns information about a given license), pyRdfa (a distiller that generates the RDF triples from an (X)HTML+RDFa file), html5lib (an HTML parser/tokenizer), and RDFLib (a library for working with RDF). The choice of this set of tools has not been obvious and the library had undergone several redesigns, which included removing the code that employed encutils, XML canonicalization, µTidylib, and the BeautifulSoup. The idea of using librdf, librdfa, rdfadict has been abandoned. The source code of both the Web application (licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 or newer) and its core library (licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License version 3 or newer) is available through the Git repositories of Creative Commons.

In contrast to the contents of the original proposal, the following goals have not been met: traversal of special links, syndication feeds parsing, statistics, and cloning the layout of the Creative Commons Web site. However, these were never mandatory requirements for the Web application. It is also worth noting that the software has been written from scratch, although a now-defunct metadata validator existed. Nevertheless, the development does not end with Google Summer of Code — these and several new features (such as validation of multimedia files via liblicense and support for different language versions) are planned to be added, albeit at a slower pace.

After the test period, the validator will be available under http://validator.creativecommons.org/. [URL]: Uniform Resource Locator [URI]: Uniform Resource Identifier [RDF]: Resource Description Framework [HTML]: HyperText Markup Language *[XML]: Extensible Markup Language