Since late July we have a shiny new official home of UK legislation at legislation.gov.uk which replaces the two current services at OPSI.gov.uk/legislation and statutelaw.gov.uk. Some functionality currently available on SLD is not yet available on legislation.gov.uk, including full content search, geographical extent and point in time advanced search options. This functionality will be added in a series of releases and once all features of the new service have been implemented the two predecessor sites will be withdrawn. Already OPSI legislation URLs are being redirected to the equivalent legislation.gov.uk resources.
legislation.gov.uk combines and integrates:
- the “as enacted” versions of legislation from OPSI, immediately on enactment
- the revised versions of legislation from the SLD, as and when available, complete with all versioning and annotation information
- the tables of effects data maintained by the SLD, linking past legislative provisions to relevant amending provisions
- the explanatory notes, integrated with the relevant legislative provisions
The interface provides simple and direct browse access to legislation by type, year and number and simple or advanced searches to locate matching legislation. The point-in-time features are not yet fully implemented, but just tag a date on to the end of a URL in the form /yyyy-mm-dd for a point in time view.
Any piece of legislation or legislation fragment can be addressed reliably and simply via the URI scheme and any list of legislation can be delivered as an Atom feed.
The service is delivered by the the National Archives (of which OPSI is part) with John Sheridan, Head of e-Services and Strategy at the helm. John describes the development in an article on VoxPopuLII from the Cornell LII.
We had two objectives with legislation.gov.uk: to deliver a high quality public service for people who need to consult, cite, and use legislation on the Web; and to expose the UK’s Statute Book as data, for people to take, use, and re-use for whatever purpose or application they wish.
There’s more about the technical project and the people behind it from Jeni Tennison, technical lead and main developer (at TSO).
With the new service up and running we can now more reliably and precisely tap into and leverage legislation resources using its API.
Congratulations to John, Jeni and team and thanks and for their support and encouragement for FreeLegalWeb.
Thanks for the post, Nick.
About the point-in-time feature: there are two ways to access it aside from URL hacking.
First, when you’re looking at an item of legislation you can click the ‘Show Timeline of Changes’ link under ‘Advanced Features’ in the left hand column. This will bring up a timeline that you can use to select a date on which the particular section that you’re looking at changed. You can then navigate through the legislation to see how it looked at that point in time.
Second, if you go to the ‘Advanced Search’, the ‘Point in time’ search is available on the left hand side. Within that, you can search for an item of legislation based on its title, year, number and type at any date that you choose (after records of changes started in 1991 at least).
Cheers,
Jeni
I read somewhere that PIT functions weren’t yet fully implemented, so didn’t look too hard to find them! I have to say that the Show Timeline of Changes route is not obvious and it doesn’t show on all views. I think it should be up there on a par with the version options.
I think the site is much clearer – and the domain name is well chosen – it makes so much sense that it’s hard to understand (without the context of the original sites) as to why http://www.legislation.gov.uk was never the first choice.
As for the browse functions – this is so much better, easier to use and follow the statutes than on http://www.statutelaw.gov.uk which over no sensible means to browse the documents onscreen. As a database I think it should remain live actually – but for drilling cleanly, http://www.legislation.gov.uk is superb.