Getting Started With UK Legislation OKF

Documentation spine · Personas and journeys · Illustrated manual · Agent guide · Evaluation · Maintenance

Open the pack

Use the hosted Explorer link. It opens the corpus overview without hydrating every work or provision.

The overview establishes the corpus boundary: legal-work count, official manifestation count, represented years, document types, categories and current source notices.

Find legislation

1. Search for an exact title, citation, year or distinctive phrase.
2. Use Category, Document Type, Creation Year and Jurisdiction to reduce ambiguous results.
3. Treat Topic as a discovery aid only; it is inferred from titles.
4. Select the exact work, checking type code, year, number and jurisdiction.
5. Open the official work if the result could be confused with a commencement, amendment or remedial instrument.

Local title search is combined with the official legislation.gov.uk full-text Atom search. Results identify whether they came from the static pack or the live official search.

Find and cite a provision

1. Open a work's detail card.
2. Review the official identifier, document type, category, year/number, jurisdiction, legal-status note and manifestations.
3. Select Load every Part, Chapter, section, article and nested provision.
4. Search within the instrument for a section number or phrase.
5. Use Selected passage to open the official pinpoint URL.
6. Use Copy provenance citation as the starting point for a citation ledger.
7. Separately check version, commencement, extent, amendments and unapplied effects.

Minimum evidence for an answer

Every material proposition should record:

• the source title;
• the direct selected-passage URL;
• the text or faithful paraphrase supporting the proposition;
• version or point-in-time context;
• commencement and extent context where material;
• retrieval date;
• any unresolved amendment, interpretation or missing-fact issue.

An Act landing page on its own is not pinpoint provenance. A catalogue result on its own is not the law.

Next steps

• Follow the illustrated manual for worked journeys.
• Use the agent research guide for automated research.
• Read the architecture and data model for ontology, completeness and API details.