Legislative Texts: Revised Current

The base format for most legislation content on the website is XML conforming to the Crown Legislation Mark-up Language (CLML) schema.

You can access the XML data on the website via the legislation API by adding "/data.xml" to any legislation content page URI e.g. the XML version of the page http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/1  is http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/1/data.xml.

The CLML mark-up standard was designed to represent UK legislation in XML and is owned and maintained by The National Archives. As a result, this format contains the most complete semantic information. However, as it needs to represent a huge variety of legislation from 1200s to the modern day it is quite complex.

This format will be most useful to you if:

• you want the most complete semantic information available for data analysis. It contains very little information relating to presentation of text.  

You can access the CLML schema online at http://www.legislation.gov.uk/schema/legislation.xsd.

The HTML5 legislation format is an alternative presentational view to the XHTML version.

You can access the HTML5 data on the website via the legislation API by adding "/data.html" to any legislation content page URI e.g. the HTML5 version of the page http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/1  is http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/1/data.html .

This format is a serialisation of the AKN XML. In other words, it’s derived from the AKN XML (rather than the CLML XML) and contains the full AKN XML mark-up in addition to the presentational information needed to display the text.

This format will be most useful to you if:

• you want XML semantic mark-up and presentational information together.  

The “Plaintext Complete” legislation format contains only the text of the legislation itself. All XML tagging, metadata, semantic mark-up, formatting and code required to display the data has been removed.

This format will be most useful to you if:

• you want to carry out text analysis of legislation documents and don’t want to process XML or HTML tagging. 

This format is similar to the "Plain Text Complete" format. Whilst the Plain Text Complete format contains all the legislation text this format only contains “operative” text, i.e. text with legal significance. Text that does not have legal value, e.g. section heading and preambles, has been removed.

This format will be most useful to you if:

• you want to carry out text analysis of legislation documents using a Plain Text format that focuses on only legally significant text. 

Akoma Ntoso (AKN) is an international legal XML standard (http://www.akomantoso.org/) which has recently become an OASIS standard (https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=legaldocml ).

You can access the AKN XML data on the website via the legislation API by adding "/data.akn" to any legislation content page URI e.g. the AKN XML version of the page http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/1  is http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/1/data.akn.

The AKN XML data is derived from the CLML XML but is somewhat simpler than the CLML XML version. However as the schema was not specifically designed for UK legislation, mark-up for some less common document structures may be more difficult to interpret.

This format will be most useful to you if:

• you want to work with an XML data format but want something a little less complex than CLML or if you want to relate UK legislation data to that provided by other international legislation publishers who use this format. It contains fairly rich semantic information but very little presentational information.

This is the default view for legislation content on the www.legislation.gov.uk website, e.g. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/1, and it is derived from the CLML XML. This format will be most useful to you if:

• you want to view or display the data as presented on the www.legislation.gov.uk website. It contains the full information required to display legislation text but very little semantic information.