To achieve interoperability in a spatial data infrastructure (SDI), conformance to specifications is essential for services and data. Service and data providers need a capability to validate their components. For several OGC standards, the OGC CITE tests provide such a capability. This covers base standards, but in SDIs typically additional specifications are added, for example, service profiles or data specifications. In the European Location Framework (ELF) the test framework ETF is used to validate INSPIRE services and data provided by National Mapping Authorities against the INSPIRE Technical Guidelines as well as against ELF-specific requirements. ETF is a test framework for spatial data infrastructure components. It supports SoapUI (for testing web services) and BaseX (for testing XML documents, including very large ones) as test engines to develop and execute test suites. ETF has been implemented in several iterations over recent years as existing open source test environments could not be configured to provide uniform test reports that were readable by and useful for non-developers. Outside of the ELF project, ETF is currently mainly used in Germany and the Netherlands, partly extending the INSPIRE-specific tests based on national profiles. We present the approach for developing user-friendly test suites and discuss typical issues that have been encountered in the ELF testing. |