The current validation methods return Set<ConstraintViolation> which forces users into string parsing in order to "navigate" to sub-properties and nested beans.

The suggestion is to add validation methods that return the ConstraintViolation's as a graph of nodes.

I think that the required node types are the same as the metadata descriptors from BV 1.1:

BeanNode (updated to match BV 1.1 style descriptors)
PropertyNode

ConstructorNode
MethodNode
ParameterNode
ReturnValueNode

I also suggest to add special nodes for bean-properties/method-parameters that are of types List/Map:

ListNode
MapNode