New test - Validation against the latest INSPIRE official schemas

[fabiovinci]

The new governance process to update the INSPIRE XML application schemas, which is one of the results of Action 2.3.1” Governance of INSPIRE Artefacts” of the INSPIRE MIWP 2020-2024, foresees the release of new versions of the schemas twice a year (which typically include updated/improved versions of only some of the schemas).

This represents a good opportunity to update the tests executed by the INSPIRE Reference Validator to take into account the new schema versions released and force validation against the official INSPIRE schemas.

This is not currently done by the Validator, which currently validates resources only against the schema(s) declared in the resources themselves (i.e. declared in the schemaLocation attribute).

The additional validation also allows to check whether existing implementations are aligned with the latest versions of the endorsed schemas and to stimulate an evolution/migration in case this is not true.

It was decided to include the validation against the latest INSPIRE official schema in addition (and not in substitution) to the validation against the declared schema(s).

After a deep analysis of the different possible solutions for the integration of the new validation, it was decided to integrate the new test, for each data theme, in the (already existing) Conformance Class “GML application schema”.

A first example has been already implemented for the data theme “Area Management, Restriction/Regulation Zones and Reporting Units”, and the related ATS “Conformance class: GML application schemas, Area Management, Restriction/Regulation Zones and Reporting Units” now includes the new test case:

The name of the new test case is “Validation against INSPIRE official schema”.

The new test is already available in the staging instance:

The “Schema validation” test in the common “Conformance class: INSPIRE GML application schemas”, which validates the resource against the schema(s) declared in the schemaLocation attribute, has been renamed “Validation against declared schema” to differentiate it from the new one.

This change is also available in the staging instance:

[fabiovinci]

The integration of the new test will continue on the remaining data themes in the order shown in the table below. We will prioritize the data themes for which there has already been a change in the schema (https://github.com/INSPIRE-MIF/application-schemas/releases).

The development will be distributed in the coming months, the tests will be integrated into the staging instance as soon as they are developed and are expected, at the moment, to be released in production in the 2022.2 release, expected for mid-June.

Order	Data Theme	Available in staging
1	AM	Yes
2	GE	Yes
3	PF	Yes
4	SO	Yes
5	MR	Yes
6	OF	Yes
7	NZ	Yes
8	US	Yes
9	AC-MF	Yes
10	EL	Yes
11	BU	Yes
12	AF	Yes
13	CP	Yes
14	HH	Yes
15	HB	Yes
16	SU	Yes
17	TN	Yes
18	PD	Yes
19	AU	Yes
20	EF	Yes
21	ER	Yes
22	LC	Yes
23	SD	Yes
24	GN	Yes
25	LU	Yes
26	SR	Yes
27	HY	Yes
28	BR	Yes
29	OI	Yes
30	AD	Yes
31	PS	Yes