DSPL Tools is a small suite of command-line utilities designed to help generate, organize, and validate DSPL datasets. The suite currently includes the following components:

• DSPL Check: Checks a dataset against a variety of criteria including adherence to the official DSPL schema, consistency of internal references, and CSV layout.
• DSPL Gen: Generates a simple, DSPL dataset “template” from an input CSV file

This software is released under a BSD license; the full source code is available for browsing and download on the DSPL open source site. Release notes are provided in the DSPL Tools README file.

DSPL stands for Dataset Publishing Language. It is a representation format for both the metadata (information about the dataset, such as its name and provider, as well as the concepts it contains and displays) and actual data of datasets. Datasets described in this format can be imported into the Google Public Data Explorer, a tool that allows for rich, visual exploration of the data.

Note: To upload data to Google Public Data using the Public Data upload tool, you must have a Google Account.

This document is intended for data owners who want their content to be available in the Public Data Explorer. It goes beyond the Tutorial by diving deeper into the details of the DSPL schema and supported features. Only a basic familiarity of XML is assumed, although knowledge of relational databases is also useful.

Although not a requirement, we suggest reading through the Tutorial, which is shorter and easier to digest, before looking at this document.