slide 11

Examples of soft validation

• Identify potential problem spots in data with ad-hoc constraint checking
  • Locate all codeblocks with lines longer than a certain length (say, 72 characters)
  • Locate all list items that do not begin with an upper-case letter
  • Are dates within a reasonable range? do death dates follow birth dates?
• Finding erroneous tagging invisible to the validator
  • Find paragraphs with no content (for whitespace)
  • ... Or other “legal” but wrong workarounds
• Finding misplaced or missing elements
  • Footnotes in the bibliography
  • Is every figure referenced at least once?
• Checking referential integrity / authority control
  beyond ID/IDREF
  • Are all cross-listings actually listed somewhere?
  • Are all part numbers represented in your database?
  • Are all values of <city> in your gazetteer?