validator module

[remiadon]

One thing we might want to do at some point in providing a provenance framework is providing a validator for it
If an institution or a user creates prov files, we should provide them a program to check the validity of those files within the framework

This program should :

• take *.json files as input
• return a boolean value at the very end
• raise warnings and errors along the way to enlighten the user about ways to fix those issues, in a clear and understandable manner.

In other words running this program acts as a sanity check.

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For warnings and errors, a way would be to use the python logging module, but that looks a bit tedious for that. For a V1 I think we can use the warnings module, and raise a warning if anything looks non-valid, and just return False in any other situation

[cmaumet]

@remiadon: +1 for the validator.

Because the model will be BIDS-compatible, it would be useful to build of the BIDS validator: https://github.com/bids-standard/bids-validator

For a demo see here: https://bids-standard.github.io/bids-validator/

The BIDS validator is very consistent in spirit with what you described except that it takes a BIDS folder as input (and not only the json file).

[remiadon]

@cmaumet I'm not sure to understand. Should we make PRs to the repo you mentionned or provide something in the same spirit ?

[cmaumet]

Once we'll have the spec ready, it will be a PR to the repo.

[remiadon]

EDIT : pySHACL seems to be a good place to start

[cmaumet]

Yes for RDF validation.

[cmaumet]

@remiadon: I beleive this issue should be removed from "sprint 2", are you fine with that?

[remiadon]

@cmaumet yep I'll save this for later

[cmaumet]

Great! Can you update https://github.com/Inria-Visages/BIDS-prov/projects/1 accordingly?

[remiadon]

Like discussed we will use a shacl file later in the project to tackle this.

[cmaumet]

Yes and this will have to live in the BIDS validator. I would say let's leave it aside for now as we focus on the spec and the examples.

[remiadon]

edit : a CI script to check parsing from SPM is required in #50

A validator module would be awesome so that CI does the following:

• parse .m files given the new spm parser
• pass the result into this validator module