JUnit Integration

[pepperbob]

We're currently using RDFUnit mainly to test if our transformations are producing RDF that complies to an underlying ontology. The current solution feeds single RDF files (effectively as Jena-Models) - that are produced by an external resource - to RDFUnit one-by-one using a parameterized JUnit-Test. Due to the long running process (~10 minutes ATM) this is usually executed by the CI-System where further reporting takes place (diagrams, statistics, etc.).

So far the process is working, but while integrating this into our dev-pipeline we spotted the following issues:

• tests are counted on a "input-model-level" via JUnit, i.e. the actual individual/auto-generated RDFUnit test-cases are not represented as every input file leads to several RDFUnit-TestCases
• this lack of granularity makes analysing issues harder as the reporting-scope and -context is usually to big, esp. when there are more than a couple of errors per input
• the entire setup is cumbersome and requires quite a bit of boilerplate

Solution: Integrate RDFUnit with JUnit
A solution could foresee a specialized JUnit-Runner that can be configured to provide essential inputs (Ontology, local CVs, Inputs) which reports RDFUnit Test-Cases to JUnit so that this information is not hidden. This could looks like:

@RunWith(RDFUnitJUnitRunner.class)
@Ontology(uri="http://reference.to.ontology")
public class SomeRdfTest {

    @ControlledVocabulary
    public Model controlledVocabularies() {
        Model cvModel = ...
        ...
        return cvModel;
    }

    @Input
    public List<Model> inputModels() {
        List<Model> modelsToVerify = ...
        ...
        return modelsToVerify; 
    }

    @After
    public void result(Model validationModel) {
        // do additional things on the validation results
    }       
}

Most notably there is no @Test method which is because most of the tests are dynamically/auto generated by the Runner. So for the given ontology a number of RDFUnit TestCases per input is created, executed and reported back to JUnit. Furthermore a Model containing local Controlled-Vocabularies can be provided, validation model can be re-injected after test is run, etc.

Not sure how RDFUnit is/should be used generally but I think this could play out nicely esp. for Unit Tests.

[dhiller]

I think we can close this issue now :)