[contents]
Copyright © 2005 W3C ® (MIT, ERCIM, Keio), All Rights Reserved. W3C liability, trademark, document use rules apply.
This document is intended as an introductory guide to the Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) 1.0, and to accompany the normative document Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) 1.0 Schema. The Evaluation and Report Language is a framework for expressing test results. Although the term test can be taken in its most widely accepted definition, EARL is primarily intended for reporting and exchanging results of tests of Web applications and resources. EARL is intended as a vendor-neutral and platform-independent format.
EARL is expressed in the form of an RDF vocabulary. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a language for representing semantically information about resources in the World Wide Web. However, EARL is not conceptually restricted to these resources and could be applied in other scenarios.
This section describes the status of this document at the time of its publication. Other documents may supersede this document. A list of current W3C publications and the latest revision of this technical report can be found in the W3C technical reports index at http://www.w3.org/TR/.
[Editor's note: describe intent of this working draft and propose feedback questions. Synchronize with EARL 1.0 Schema.]
Please send comments to the mailing list of the ERT WG. The archives for this list are publicly available.
This is a W3C Working Draft of the Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) 1.0 Guide. This document will be published and maintained as a W3C Recommendation after review and refinement. Publication as a Working Draft does not imply endorsement by the W3C Membership. This is a draft document and may be updated, replaced or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to cite this document as other than work in progress.
This document was produced under the 5 February 2004 W3C Patent Policy. The Working Group maintains a public list of patent disclosures relevant to this document; that page also includes instructions for disclosing a patent. An individual who has actual knowledge of a patent which the individual believes contains Essential Claim(s) with respect to this specification should disclose the information in accordance with section 6 of the W3C Patent Policy.
This document has been produced as part of the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). The goals of the Evaluation and Repair Tools Working Group (ERT WG) are discussed in the Working Group charter. The ERT WG is part of the WAI Technical Activity.
This document provides an introductory guide to the Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) 1.0, and is intended to accompany the normative document Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) 1.0 Schema.
The objectives of this document are:
Although this document does not assume any previous knowledge of EARL, the following knowledge is assumed:
Although the concepts of the Semantic Web are simple, their abstraction with RDF is know to bring difficulties to beginners. It is recommended to read carefully the aforementioned references and other tutorials found on the Web. It must be also borne in mind that RDF is primarily targeted to be machine processable, and therefore, some its expressions are not very intuitive for developers used to work with XML only.
The Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) is a framework targeted to express and compare test results. EARL builds on top of the Resource Description Framework [RDF], which is the basis for the Semantic Web. It is not the object of this document to introduce the reader to the intricacies of RDF, and some basic knowledge must be assumed as a pre-requisite (see, e.g., [RDF-PRIMER] for more information). Like any RDF vocabulary, EARL is no more than a collection of statements about resources, each with a subject, a predicate (or a verb) and an object. These statements can be serialized in many ways (e.g., RDF/XML, or Notation 3 also known as N3). A typical EARL report could contain the following statements (oversimplifying the notation and not including namespaces):
<#someone> <#checks> <#resource> . <#resource> <#fails> <#test> .
[Editor's note: Accessibility business case ...]
From these simple two statements, it can be inferred already the main components of an EARL Report (wrapped up in an assertion):
This structure shows the universal applicability of EARL and its ability to refer to any type of test: bug reports, software unit tests, test suite evaluations, conformance claims or even tests outside the world of software and the World Wide Web (although for such cases, there might also be open issues for its full aplicability). It must be stressed again the semantic nature of EARL: its purpose is to facilitate the extraction and comparison of test results by humans and especially by tools (the semantic Web paradigm); it is not simply an storage of information, for which some other XML application might be more suitable.
Summarising, the objectives of EARL are to:
It is also important that the extensibility of RDF (or EARL) allows to tool vendors or developers the addition of new functionalities to the vocabulary, without losing any of the aforementioned characteristics, as other testers might ignore those extensions that they do not understand when processing third party results.
The applicability of EARL to different scenarios can be seen in the following use cases:
[Editor's note: Maybe add some more exotic scenario outside the Web and software development.]
EARL is flexible enough to respond to the needs of a variety of audiences involved in a testing or quality assurance process. Typical profiles are:
The Standard [IEEE-829] defines a set of basic software tests documents. Of course, the scope of EARL is limited to the reporting process, but an analysis of [IEEE-829] will help us to fit EARL in any generic test process (extrapolated from a software testing environment). For [IEEE-829], the three key documents for a testing process are:
Figure 1 displays graphically the aforementioned elements:
Figure 1. Test documentation process (IEEE 829 standard).
EARL is not an standalone vocabulary, and builds on top of many existing vocabularies that cover some of its needs for metadata definition. This approach avoids the re-creation of applications already established and tested like the Dublin Core elements. The referenced specifications are:
RDF can be serialized in different ways, but the XML representation [RDF/XML] is the preferred method and will be used throughout this document. However, even when selecting this approach, there are many equivalent ways to express an RDF model.
Table 1 presents the core namespaces used by EARL. The prefix refers to the convention used in this document to denote a given namespace, and can be freely modified.
Namespace prefix | Namespace URI | Description |
---|---|---|
earl |
http://www.w3.org/ns/earl# |
The default EARL
namespace. Where RDF
terms are used in their abbreviated form (e.g., Assertion or
foaf:Person ), if no namespace is provided the term is in the EARL namespace. |
rdf |
http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns# |
Default RDF namespace [RDF]. |
rdfs |
http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema# |
Default RDF schema namespace [RDFS]. |
owl |
http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl# |
Default OWL namespace [OWL]. |
dc |
http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/ |
Dublin Core Metadata Element Set namespace. |
dct |
http://purl.org/dc/terms/ |
Dublin Core Metadata Terms namespace. |
foaf |
http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/ |
FOAF namespace. |
http |
http://www.w3.org/2006/12/http# |
Default HTTP in RDF namespace. |
http-header |
http://www.w3.org/2006/http-header# |
Default HTTP headers in RDF namespace. |
Most of the examples in this guide are using the RDF/XML serialization RDF/XML. Occasionally, other serializations may be used.
Let us start building our first EARL report with its root element. The root element of any EARL report is an RDF node, as with any RDF vocabulary. There, we declare the corresponding namespaces, as described in Table 1, plus any custom namespace used to define additional classes and or properties.
Example 3.1. The root element of an EARL report.
<rdf:RDF xmlns:earl="http://www.w3.org/ns/earl#" xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#"> <!-- ... --> </rd:RDF>
Once we have defined the root element, let us build step-by-step the different components of a simple EARL report. Let us assume we want to express the results of an XHTML validation in a given document with the W3C HTML Validator in EARL. The tested document has the following HTML code:
Example 3.2. An XHTML document to be validated.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en"> <head> <title>Example of project pages</title> </head> <body> <h1>Project description</h1> <h2>My project name</h2> <p>The strategic goal of this project is to make you understand EARL.</p> <ul> <li>Here comes objective 1. <li>Here comes objective 2.</li> </ul> <p alt="what?">And goodbye ...</p> </body> </html>
This document has three errors that will constitute the basis of our EARL report:
li
"
here; missing one of "ul
", "ol
" start-tag.li
" omitted, but OMITTAG NO
was specified.alt
".Let us start by defining who (or what) run the test. In the
EARL jargon, that is an Assertor
. There are two types of
Assertor
s, SingleAssertor
and CompoundAssertor
.
Assuming the test was run by a person with the W3C HTML Validator, we can use a
CompoundAssertor
with the following structure.
Example 3.3. EARL report with a compound assertor.
<rdf:RDF xmlns:http="http://www.w3.org/2006/12/http#" xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/" xmlns:earl="http://www.w3.org/ns/earl#" xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xml:base="http://www.example.org/earl/report#"> <earl:CompoundAssertor rdf:ID="assertor01"> <earl:helpAssertor> <foaf:Person> <foaf:mbox rdf:resource="mailto:john@example.org"/> <foaf:name>John Doe</foaf:name> </foaf:Person> </earl:helpAssertor> <earl:mainAssertor rdf:resource="http://validator.w3.org/about.html#"/> <dc:title>John Doe and the W3C HTML Validator</dc:title> </earl:CompoundAssertor> <earl:SingleAssertor rdf:about="http://validator.w3.org/about.html#"> <dct:hasVersion>0.7.1</dct:hasVersion> <dc:description xml:lang="en">W3C Markup Validation Service, a free service that checks Web documents in formats like HTML and XHTML for conformance to W3C Recommendations and other standards. </dc:description> <dc:title xml:lang="en">W3C HTML Validator</dc:title> </earl:SingleAssertor> <!-- ... --> </rdf:RDF>
To begin to gather the richness of RDF, the previous
snippet can be expressed differently. First, the help assertor can be expressed as an
anonymous node, and the W3C HTML
Validator could be expressed as a Software
class, one of the
SingleAssertor
classes of EARL.
Example 3.4. EARL report with a compound assertor. The help assertor is expressed as anonymous node.
<rdf:RDF xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/" xmlns:earl="http://www.w3.org/ns/earl#" xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xml:base="http://www.example.org/earl/report#"> <earl:CompoundAssertor rdf:ID="assertor01"> <earl:helpAssertor> <foaf:Person> <foaf:mbox rdf:resource="mailto:john@example.org"/> <foaf:name>John Doe</foaf:name> </foaf:Person> </earl:helpAssertor> <earl:mainAssertor> <earl:Software rdf:about="http://validator.w3.org/about.html#"/> </earl:mainAssertor> <dc:title>John Doe and the W3C HTML Validator</dc:title> </earl:CompoundAssertor> <earl:Software rdf:about="http://validator.w3.org/about.html#"> <dct:hasVersion>0.7.1</dct:hasVersion> <dc:description xml:lang="en">W3C Markup Validation Service, a free service that checks Web documents in formats like HTML and XHTML for conformance to W3C Recommendations and other standards. </dc:description> <dc:title xml:lang="en">W3C HTML Validator</dc:title> </earl:Software> <!-- ... --> </rdf:RDF>
Notice that this is only one of multiple serializations via an anonymous node. This representation is equivalent, for instance, to the following non-abbreviated mode.
Example 3.5. EARL report with a compound assertor: non-abbreviated XML serialization.
<rdf:RDF xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/" xmlns:earl="http://www.w3.org/ns/earl#" xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xml:base="http://www.example.org/earl/report#" > <rdf:Description rdf:about="#assertor01"> <earl:helpAssertor rdf:nodeID="johnDoe"/> <earl:mainAssertor rdf:resource="http://validator.w3.org/about.html#"/> <dc:title>John Doe and the W3C HTML Validator</dc:title> <rdf:type rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/ns/earl#CompoundAssertor"/> </rdf:Description> <rdf:Description rdf:nodeID="johnDoe"> <foaf:mbox rdf:resource="mailto:john@example.org"/> <foaf:name>John Doe</foaf:name> <rdf:type rdf:resource="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Person"/> </rdf:Description> <rdf:Description rdf:about="http://validator.w3.org/about.html#"> <dct:hasVersion>0.7.1</dct:hasVersion> <dc:description xml:lang="en">W3C Markup Validation Service, a free service that checks Web documents in formats like HTML and XHTML for conformance to W3C Recommendations and other standards. </dc:description> <dc:title xml:lang="en">W3C HTML Validator</dc:title> <rdf:type rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/ns/earl#Software"/> </rdf:Description> <!-- ... --> </rdf:RDF>
The same report could be expressed in Tim Berners-Lee's N3 language in the following way.
Example 3.6. EARL report with a compound assertor: N3 serialization.
@prefix earl: <http://www.w3.org/ns/earl#> . @prefix foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/> . @prefix dct: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/> . <http://www.example.org/earl/report#assertor01> a earl:CompoundAssertor ; <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/title> "John Doe and the W3C HTML Validator" ; earl:helpAssertor [ a foaf:Person ; foaf:mbox <mailto:john@example.org> ; foaf:name "John Doe" ] ; earl:mainAssertor <http://validator.w3.org/about.html#> . <http://validator.w3.org/about.html#> a earl:Software ; <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/description> """W3C Markup Validation Service, a free service that checks Web documents in formats like HTML and XHTML for conformance to W3C Recommendations and other standards."""@en ; <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/title> "W3C HTML Validator"@en ; dct:hasVersion "0.7.1" .
The next step is to define the tested
resource. For that, EARL offers the TestSubject
class.
This class is a generic wrapper for things to be tested like Web resources
(Content
) or software (Software
). For our first example, let
us use the generic TestSubject
class, which must have a Dublin Core date
property:
Example 3.7. EARL report with a test subject.
<rdf:RDF xmlns:earl="http://www.w3.org/ns/earl#" xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xml:base="http://www.example.org/earl/report#"> <earl:TestSubject rdf:about="http://example.org/resource/index.html"> <dc:date rdf:datatype="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#date" >2006-02-14</dc:date> <dc:title xml:lang="en">Project Description</dc:title> </earl:TestSubject> <!-- ... --> </rdf:RDF>
[Editor's note: Probably is more adequate express URLs of TestSubject in terms of the HTTP in RDF Vocabulary.]
Which expressed as N3 serialization looks like the following example.
Example 3.8. EARL report with a test subject: N3 serialization.
@prefix earl: <http://www.w3.org/ns/earl#> . <http://example.org/resource/index.html> <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/date> "2006-02-14"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#date> . <http://example.org/resource/index.html> <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/title> "Project Description"@en . <http://example.org/resource/index.html> a earl:TestSubject .
The
third step is to define the criterion used for testing the given resource. EARL defines
test criteria under the umbrella of the TestCriterion
class. This class has
two subclasses, TestRequirement
and TestCase
, depending on
whether the criterion is a high level requirement, composed of many tests, or an atomic
test case. In our example, we are testing validity with XHTML 1.0 Strict, which could be expressed in
the following way via the TestRequirement
class:
Example 3.9. EARL report displaying the test requirement for validation.
<rdf:RDF xmlns:earl="http://www.w3.org/ns/earl#" xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xml:base="http://www.example.org/earl/report#"> <earl:TestRequirement rdf:about="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <dc:description xml:lang="en">DTD for XHTML 1.0 Strict.</dc:description> <dc:title xml:lang="en">XHTML 1.0 Strict Document Type Definition</dc:title> </earl:TestRequirement> <!-- ... --> </rdf:RDF>
Before we build up our assertion about our hypothetical
evaluation, let us construct the result of the test with the three errors highlighted by
the validator. This is done via the TestResult
class. At this stage, we
will not discuss in detail the description of error locations: we will limit ourselves
to textual description of the errors.
Example 3.10. EARL report displaying different error results from the validation test.
<rdf:RDF xmlns:earl="http://www.w3.org/ns/earl#" xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xml:base="http://www.example.org/earl/report#"> <earl:TestResult rdf:ID="error1"> <dc:description rdf:parseType="Literal"> <div xml:lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p>Error - Line 14 column 7: document type does not allow element <code>li</code> here; missing one of <code>ul</code>, <code>ol</code> start-tag.</p> </div> </dc:description> <earl:outcome rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/ns/earl#fail"/> </earl:TestResult> <earl:TestResult rdf:ID="error2"> <dc:description rdf:parseType="Literal"> <div xml:lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p>Error - Line 15 column 6: end tag for <code>li</code> omitted, but OMITTAG NO was specified.</p></div> </dc:description> <earl:outcome rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/ns/earl#fail"/> </earl:TestResult> <earl:TestResult rdf:ID="error3"> <dc:description rdf:parseType="Literal"> <div xml:lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p>Error - Line 16 column 9: there is no attribute<code>alt</code>.</p></div> </dc:description> <earl:outcome rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/ns/earl#fail"/> </earl:TestResult> <!-- ... --> </rdf:RDF>
For the sake of completeness, we have included the three
validation errors. Finally, we are ready to put together all the pieces of the puzzle.
As discussed earlier, this is done via assertions. An Assertion
is an
statement that links together who made the test, what was tested, which requirements
were analyzed for compliance and the result of the test. It must have the following
properties:
earl:assertedBy
Assertion
must be asserted by an assertor. The assertor is a
human or software, or groups of these, that determine the result.earl:subject
earl:test
earl:result
Example 3.11. An EARL assertion pointing to components defined in the previous examples.
<rdf:RDF xmlns:earl="http://www.w3.org/ns/earl#" xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xml:base="http://www.example.org/earl/report#"> <earl:Assertion rdf:ID="ass3"> <earl:result rdf:resource="#error3"/> <earl:test rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"/> <earl:subject rdf:resource="http://example.org/resource/index.html"/> <earl:assertedBy rdf:resource="#assertor01"/> </earl:Assertion> <earl:Assertion rdf:ID="ass1"> <earl:result rdf:resource="#error1"/> <earl:test rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"/> <earl:subject rdf:resource="http://example.org/resource/index.html"/> <earl:assertedBy rdf:resource="#assertor01"/> </earl:Assertion> <earl:Assertion rdf:ID="ass2"> <earl:result rdf:resource="#error2"/> <earl:test rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"/> <earl:subject rdf:resource="http://example.org/resource/index.html"/> <earl:assertedBy rdf:resource="#assertor01"/> </earl:Assertion> <!-- ... --> </rdf:RDF>
We can now put together all the elements of our first EARL report:
Example 3.12. Our first complete EARL report.
<rdf:RDF xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/" xmlns:earl="http://www.w3.org/ns/earl#" xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xml:base="http://www.example.org/earl/report#"> <earl:Assertion rdf:ID="ass1"> <earl:assertedBy rdf:resource="#assertor01"/> <earl:result rdf:resource="#error1"/> <earl:test rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"/> <earl:subject rdf:resource="http://example.org/resource/index.html"/> </earl:Assertion> <earl:Assertion rdf:ID="ass2"> <earl:assertedBy rdf:resource="#assertor01"/> <earl:result rdf:resource="#error2"/> <earl:test rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"/> <earl:subject rdf:resource="http://example.org/resource/index.html"/> </earl:Assertion> <earl:Assertion rdf:ID="ass3"> <earl:assertedBy rdf:resource="#assertor01"/> <earl:result rdf:resource="#error3"/> <earl:test rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"/> <earl:subject rdf:resource="http://example.org/resource/index.html"/> </earl:Assertion> <earl:SingleAssertor rdf:about="http://validator.w3.org/about.html#"> <dct:hasVersion>0.7.1</dct:hasVersion> <dc:description xml:lang="en">W3C Markup Validation Service, a free service that checks Web documents in formats like HTML and XHTML for conformance to W3C Recommendations and other standards. </dc:description> <dc:title xml:lang="en">W3C HTML Validator</dc:title> </earl:SingleAssertor> <earl:CompoundAssertor rdf:ID="assertor01"> <earl:helpAssertor> <foaf:Person> <foaf:mbox rdf:resource="mailto:john@example.org"/> <foaf:name>John Doe</foaf:name> </foaf:Person> </earl:helpAssertor> <earl:mainAssertor rdf:resource="http://validator.w3.org/about.html#"/> <dc:title>John Doe and the W3C HTML Validator</dc:title> </earl:CompoundAssertor> <earl:TestSubject rdf:about="http://example.org/resource/index.html"> <dc:date rdf:datatype="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#date" >2006-02-14</dc:date> <dc:title xml:lang="en">Project Description</dc:title> </earl:TestSubject> <earl:TestRequirement rdf:about="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <dc:description xml:lang="en">DTD for XHTML 1.0 Strict.</dc:description> <dc:title xml:lang="en">XHTML 1.0 Strict Document Type Definition</dc:title> </earl:TestRequirement> <earl:TestResult rdf:ID="error1"> <dc:description rdf:parseType="Literal"> <div xml:lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p>Error - Line 14 column 7: document type does not allow element <code>li</code> here; missing one of <code>ul</code>, <code>ol</code> start-tag.</p></div> </dc:description> <earl:outcome rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/ns/earl#fail"/> </earl:TestResult> <earl:TestResult rdf:ID="error2"> <dc:description rdf:parseType="Literal"> <div xml:lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p>Error - Line 15 column 6: end tag for <code>li</code> omitted, but OMITTAG NO was specified.</p></div> </dc:description> <earl:outcome rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/ns/earl#fail"/> </earl:TestResult> <earl:TestResult rdf:ID="error3"> <dc:description rdf:parseType="Literal"> <div xml:lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p>Error - Line 16 column 9: there is no attribute<code>alt</code>.</p></div> </dc:description> <earl:outcome rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/ns/earl#fail"/> </earl:TestResult> </rdf:RDF>
In this section we have reviewed all the necessary steps to build our first EARL report. Despite its verbosity, the report above is rather simple. In the followingAs mentioned already several times, Example 3.12 is only one of the multiple serializations that allow us to express the corresponding RDF graph (see Figure 2 for a graphical representation of the first assertion).
Figure 2. First assertion of Example 3.12.
The previous section introduced us to the core components of an EARL report. In this section we will review the core classes and properties of EARL, together with some clarifications on its usage. The decomposition of every class is followed by the set of RDF properties the class must or may have.
The
Assertion
class is used to declare an statement about the results of a
test. As shown in Section 2, an Assertion binds together the
four components of EARL: the assertor, the subject, the test requirement and its result
(see Example 3.11). It is therefore the fundamental unit of an
EARL statement or set of
statements.
An Assertion
must have at least the following
properties:
Assertor
s or subclasses of it.TestSubject
s (therefore, its subclasses
Software
and Content
can be also referenced here).TestCriterion
or subclasses of it.TestResult
s.An Assertion
may also include the following optional
properties:
TestMode
instance.Figure 3 presents a graph of the Assertion
Class.
Figure 3. An EARL
Assertion
graph.
The
Assertor
class are the persons, tools or combinations thereof, that
performs the test reported in the assertions of the reports. There are two classes of
Assertor
s:
SingleAssertor
).CompoundAssertor
).Figure 4. An EARL
Assertor
graph.
A SingleAssertor
is one single entity or agent responsible
for the report. A SingleAssertor
can be one of the following types:
foaf:Agent
Assertor
is an Agent, as defined in the FOAF specification [FOAF]. Any subclass of it can be a SingleAssertor
,
however, it is recommended to be one of foaf:Person
or
foaf:Organization
. It is not recommended to use the subclass
foaf:Group
. Use a compound assertor for such cases.foaf:Person
Assertor
is a human being. This uses the
FOAF vocabulary term foaf:Person
to describe a
person [FOAF]. There should be identifying information
including a name, and a uniquely identifying property such as email address or an
encrypted email address. At least, the properties foaf:name
,
foaf:mbox
or foaf:mbox_sha1sum
should be used. It is
strongly recommended to use the later for privacy considerations.Example 4.1. Example of a FOAF Person description.
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#" xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"> <foaf:Person rdf:ID="jd"> <foaf:name>John Doe</foaf:name> <foaf:title>Dr.</foaf:title> <foaf:givenname>John</foaf:givenname> <foaf:family_name>Doe</foaf:family_name> <foaf:mbox_sha1sum>a94d730850a2b4b71239756a0f301e6462263e07</foaf:mbox_sha1sum> <foaf:homepage rdf:resource="http://www.example.org/jdoe" /> </foaf:Person> </rdf:RDF>
foaf:Organization
Assertor
represents an organization [FOAF].
There should be identifying information for the organization, including a name, and
a uniquely identifying property such as a home page. The properties
foaf:name
, foaf:homepage
should be used to provide this
information.Example 4.2. Example of a FOAF Organization description.
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#" xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"> <foaf:Organization rdf:ID="exOrg"> <foaf:name>Example Organization</foaf:name> <foaf:homepage rdf:resource="http://www.example.org/" /> </foaf:Organization> </rdf:RDF>
earl:Software
Assertor
is a piece of Software, such as a black box testing
tool, an SGML validator or an accessibility evaluation tool. See Section 4.3.1 for further details. Notice that
earl:Software
can be both an assertor or a test subject.Example 4.3. Example of an EARL Software class.
<rdf:RDF xmlns:earl="http://www.w3.org/ns/earl#" xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"> <earl:Software rdf:about="http://example.org/svgValidator"> <dct:hasVersion>1.0</dct:hasVersion> <dc:description xml:lang="en">An SVG validator in all its flavours. </dc:description> <dc:title xml:lang="en">SVG Validator</dc:title> </earl:Software> </rdf:RDF>
Assertor
is a group of entities (i.e., persons, organizations and/or
software tools). Each group must have at least one primary assertor and may have one or
more secondary assertors, identified, respectively, by the properties:SingleAssertor
).SingleAssertor
).Additionally, there are an optional description and title, identified by the
Dublin Core dc:title
and dc:description
properties,
respectively.
If it is not possible to determine the hierarchy of the assertors (for instance, a group of accessibility experts carrying out a test in a Web site), all of them are considered main assertors. This also applies to aggregation of test results from different sources.
[Editor's note:
.]
[Editor's note: Security section.]
[Editor's note: An aggregation example. E.g., validation and accessibility report.]
Example x.x.
XXX
[Editor's note: Self-explanatory.]
http://www.dublincore.org/documents/dces/
http://www.dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/
http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/
http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-rdf-syntax-19990222/
http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-primer/
http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema/
http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-syntax-grammar/
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/RDF-XML
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt
http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-features/
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/
[Editor's note: To be determined.]