Free Akoma Ntoso Validator
August 23, 2013
How are people doing with the Library of Congress’ Akoma Ntoso Challenge? Hopefully, you’re making good progress, having fun doing it, and in so doing, learning a valuable new skill with this important emerging technology.
I decided to make it easy for someone without an XML Editor to validate their Akoma Ntoso documents for free. We all know how expensive XML Editors tend to be. If you’re like me, you’ve used up all the free trials you could get. I’ve separated the validation part of our LegisProweb editor from the editing base to allow it to be used as a standalone validator. Now, all you need to do is either provide a URL to your document or, even easier, drop the text into the text area provided and then click on the “Validate” button. You don’t even need to go find a copy of the Akoma Ntoso schema or figure out how to hook it up to your document – I do all that for you.
To use the validator, simply draft your Akoma Ntoso XML document, specifying the appropriate namespace using the @xmlns namespace declaration, and then paste a copy into the validator. I’ll go and find the schema and then validate your document for you. The validation results will be shown to you conveniently inline within your XML source to help you in making fixes. Don’t worry, we don’t record anything when you use the validator – it’s completely anonymous and we keep no record of your document.
You can validate either the 2.0 version of Akoma Ntoso or the latest 3.0 version which reflects the work of the OASIS LegalDocumentML committee. Actually, there are quite a few other formats that the validator also will work with innately and, by using xsi:schemaLocation, you can point to any XML schema you wish.
Give the free Akoma Ntoso XML Validator a try. You can access it here. Please send me any feedback you might have.
