Expectations from the community on the use of the Validator

[MarcoMinghini]

Dear all,

as you may have noticed, over the last few weeks the INSPIRE Reference Validator has been unavailable on multiple occasions, mainly due to an exceptionally high use from the community.

In many cases, the unavailability was caused by one single organisation performing multiple, resource-intensive validations in a very short amount of time (e.g. 1 new validation launched every second). Very often, these were validations of GML datasets and/or services (mostly WMS and WFS), which are the types of validations requiring most resources.

We would like to remind that the INSPIRE Reference Validator is a public tool serving the need of the whole INSPIRE community (more than 7000 organisations), hence it should not be used as a massive validation tool by single organisations.

All organisations are kindly invited to make a moderate use of the tool, i.e. limiting validations to few resources each day and in any case, making sure that each new validation is not launched before the previous one has completed.

The idea is that, through the validation of a limited number of resources, you get the required information to then improve those resources (which in most cases will allow you to improve all/most of your resources) and then proceed again to the testing. This message also applies to those users/organisations who requested an API key for automated validations (see #594).

In case you need to perform massive validations, we recommend to deploy and use a local instance of the Validator. Deployment instructions are available together with any release, see e.g. the latest one here.

We thank you for your attention and count on your support to make the best use of the Validator for the benefit of the whole INSPIRE community.