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Community & Business Groups

RDF Test Suite Curation Community Group

The purpose of this group is to provide a home for the test suites and implementation reports of various Semantic Web/Linked Data specifications. After the end of a working group, the test suites often become frozen, and it is difficult to add new tests for issues that come to light later on. Similarly, some specs are implemented on a base technology, which eventually evolves (e.g. SPARQL 1.1 and RDF 1.1), and developers need access to updated tests. This group will create a home for forks of the various test suites that would be appropriate to act as a redirect for existing tests. Test updates will be considered based on the consensus of those invested in the related specifications. Implementation reports can be updated as new reports are received, giving implementations visibility. This group will not publish Specifications.

w3c/rdf-tests

Group's public email, repo and wiki activity over time

Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.

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CG Activity on GitHub

The work of the CG is being performed on GitHub. The list of test suites managed, is available through the gh-pages view. The general process followed is the following:

  • New test suites may be added via a PR request against the rdf-tests repository, or by filing an issue using the issue tracker for subsequent activity.
  • Proposed changes to a given test suite may be discussed on public-rdf-tests@w3.org (archive), but ultimately should result in an issue being created on the issue tracker.
  • Changes should either be made on a separate fork of the repository, and integrated via pull request, or on a feature branch within the main repository (prefix branch name with “feature-” or “issue-n-“, where “n” is the issue number relating to the proposed update). Any change that results in a functional change to an existing test suite must be included by consensus of this group, and the related comments group of the associated working group, and should have two implementations which pass the tests. Once consensus is reached, a pull request including this feature branch may be integrated into the main (gh-pages) branch.
    Note that naming conventions for tests often make conflicting overlaps inevitable, so consider this when naming new tests and formatting the test manifests.
  • Some updates, e.g. more extensive updates to the SPARQL test suite, may require branching off of, and merging back into, a separate feature branch, so that a set of changes can be staged before updating the gh-pages branch.
  • After a changes to a given test suite become stable, a “release” branch can be created to record the state of the test suite at that time.
  • All changes affecting a given test suite should be broadcast to the appropriate comments list (public-rdf-comments@w3.org or public-sparql-dev@w3.org at this point).
  • Implementations can typically access a given test suite using the gh-pages view. For example, the Turtle test manifest can be accessed at  https://w3c.github.io/rdf-tests/turtle/manifest.ttl. Accessing test suites though an alternative branch via HTTP requires the use of a different facility, such as https://raw.githubusercontent.com/w3c/rdf-tests/gh-pages/turtle/manifest.ttl, where “gh-pages” is replaced by the appropriate branch name.

Call for Participation in RDF Test Suite Curation Community Group

The RDF Test Suite Curation Community Group has been launched:


The purpose of this group is to provide a home for the test suites and implementation reports of various Semantic Web/Linked Data specifications. After the end of a working group, the test suites often become frozen, and it is difficult to add new tests for issues that come to light later on. Similarly, some specs are implemented on a base technology, which eventually evolves (e.g. SPARQL 1.1 and RDF 1.1), and developers need access to updated tests.

This group will create a home for forks of the various test suites that would be appropriate to act as a redirect for existing tests. Test updates will be considered based on the consensus of those invested in the related specifications. Implementation reports can be updated as new reports are received, giving implementations visibility.

This group will not publish Specifications.


In order to join the group, you will need a W3C account. Please note, however, that W3C Membership is not required to join a Community Group.

This is a community initiative. This group was originally proposed on 2015-09-04 by Gregg Kellogg. The following people supported its creation: Gregg Kellogg, David Lehn, james anderson, Richard Cyganiak, Niklas Lindström, David Booth, Pavlik elf. W3C’s hosting of this group does not imply endorsement of the activities.

The group must now choose a chair. Read more about how to get started in a new group and good practice for running a group.

We invite you to share news of this new group in social media and other channels.

If you believe that there is an issue with this group that requires the attention of the W3C staff, please email us at site-comments@w3.org

Thank you,
W3C Community Development Team