oc-validator 0.3.0

A software to validate CSV documents storing citation data and bibliographic metadata according to the OpenCitations Data Model.

oc_validator

oc_validator is a Python (≥3.9) library to validate CSV documents storing citation data and bibliographic metadata. To be processed by the validator, the tables must be built as either CITS-CSV or META-CSV tables, defined in two specification documents[^1][^2].

[^1]: Massari, Arcangelo, and Ivan Heibi. 2022. ‘How to Structure Citations Data and Bibliographic Metadata in the OpenCitations Accepted Format’. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2206.03971.

[^2]: Massari, Arcangelo. 2022. ‘How to Produce Well-Formed CSV Files for OpenCitations’. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6597141.

Installation

The library can be installed from pip:

pip install oc_validator

Usage

The validation process can be executed from the CLI, by running the following command:

python -m oc_validator.main -i <input csv file path> -o <output dir path>

An object of the Validator class is instantiated, passing as parameters the path to the input document to validate and the path to the directory where to store the output. By calling the validate() method on the instance of Validator, the validation process gets executed.

The process automatically detects which of the two tables has been passed as input (on condition that the input CSV document's header is formatted correctly for at least one of them). During the process, the whole document is always processed: if the document is invalid or contains anomalies, the errors/warnings are reported in detail in a JSON file and summarized in a .txt file, which will be automatically created in the output directory. validate also returns a list of dictionaries corresponding to the JSON validation report (empty if the document is valid).

v = Validator('path/to/table.csv', 'output/directory')
v.validate()