Monday, February 2, 2009

Problems with RDF validator: undecodable data

We're experiencing problems in validating FOAF files. The two identical files served by different servers give different results. The first validates successfully but the other produces an error:
"An attempt to load the RDF from URI 'http://cs.umbc.edu/~ctilmes1/ foaf.rdf' failed. (Undecodable data when reading URI at byte 0 using encoding 'UTF-8'. Please check encoding and encoding declaration of your document.)"
Checking the headers when getting two files shows them to be identical and have reasonable http headers:

% GET http://cs.umbc.edu/~ctilmes1/foaf.rdf | md5sum
74ca1b53dab1591a76517d714686936a -
% GET http://userpages.umbc.edu/~ctilmes1/foaf.rdf | md5sum
74ca1b53dab1591a76517d714686936a -

% HEAD http://cs.umbc.edu/~ctilmes1/foaf.rdf
200 OK
Connection: close
Date: Mon, 02 Feb 2009 15:45:49 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
ETag: "603-dff-461f145761dea"
Server: Apache
Content-Length: 3583
Content-Type: application/rdf+xml
Last-Modified: Mon, 02 Feb 2009 15:33:07 GMT
Client-Date: Mon, 02 Feb 2009 15:45:49 GMT
Client-Peer: 130.85.36.80:80
Client-Response-Num: 1

% HEAD http://userpages.umbc.edu/~ctilmes1/foaf.rdf
200 OK
Connection: close
Date: Mon, 02 Feb 2009 15:45:58 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
ETag: "2a27001e-dff-49871180"
Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) mod_fastcgi/2.4.2 PHP/4.3.10 mod_perl/
1.29 mod_ssl/2.8.22 OpenSSL/0.9.7d
Content-Length: 3583
Content-Type: application/rdf+xml
Last-Modified: Mon, 02 Feb 2009 15:30:08 GMT
Client-Date: Mon, 02 Feb 2009 15:45:58 GMT
Client-Peer: 130.85.24.44:80
Client-Response-Num: 1

We've sent email to the W3C www-rdf-validator list, but if anyon has advice, please let us know.

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