OKF Explorer OKF Explorer documentation

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. The Reader shows a labelled excerpt for long passages. Select Show full passage text to read the complete normalised text before citing it. The official link keeps a dated, enacted or made version after the provision path where one is supplied.
  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:

An Act landing page on its own is not pinpoint provenance. A catalogue result on its own is not the law. CLML is loaded on demand with an 8 MiB response limit and a 20,000-element parse limit. If either limit is reached, open the official CLML directly. The Reader keeps source element IDs, hierarchy, status and source version separate from its normalised labels and excerpt. Parent passage text includes nested wording; the tree also shows each nested provision separately. The source details show the byte length and SHA-256 hash of the downloaded XML, which you can save.

Next steps