[doap-interest] advice on how to change code parsing doap files

[Thomas Vander Stichele]

Hi,

in my code (MOAP) I parse a .doap file and create the various objects
from the .doap file.

Someone said he preferred my code to error out if a <Version> section
was missing required information, and I agree with him.  Right now it
just silently skips it.

It does so because I have this SPARQL query in my code:

PREFIX rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>
PREFIX dc: <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/>
PREFIX doap: <http://usefulinc.com/ns/doap#>
PREFIX foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/>
SELECT ?projectId, ?name, ?branch, ?revision, ?created, ?description
WHERE {
      ?project rdf:type doap:Project .
      ?project doap:shortname ?projectId .
      ?project doap:release ?release .
      ?release doap:name ?name .
      ?release doap:branch ?branch .
      ?release doap:revision ?revision .
      ?release doap:created ?created
      OPTIONAL { ?release dc:description ?description }
}
ORDER BY DESC(?created)


My first instinct was to move all of the release-related WHERE sections
into an OPTIONAL, but then I stopped and thought:

"shouldn't the point of describing the syntax of doap allow me to
validate any .doap file in the first place" ?

So, since you're all much more expert than me, please tell me:
- what would be the right approach to validate any .doap file against
required arguments for all its sections
- how would I do this using redland (and its python bindings) ?
- how can it be avoided to do a web lookup every time for the syntax
files ?

Thanks
Thomas

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