Legislation.gov.uk provides many different kinds of data about different things. Our data model describes how the things relate to one another and how we represent information about them in our data.
The key concepts we represent in our data are:
We identify things in our data using URIs (short for “uniform resource identifier”). A URI is an identifier that looks like an address of a page or resource on a website. In many cases these URIs are functioning web addresses: we say that it is possible to resolve these URIs, which means that if you open the URI in a web browser or other suitable application, you can get a page or resource that represents the thing that the URI identifies.
The following are examples of legislation.gov.uk URIs:
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/id/ukpga/1985/67 identifies the Transport Act 1985http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2013/376/regulation/12/2015-03-27 identifies regulation 12 of the Universal Credit Regulations 2013, as it stood on 27/3/2015http://www.legislation.gov.uk/anaw/2016/3/part/3/enacted/welsh/data.pdf identifies the PDF manifestation of the Welsh enacted version of Part 3 of the Environment (Wales) Act 2016http://www.legislation.gov.uk/id/effect/key-f8ca0da7874670764680c0bcf1a72bbe identifies an effect from article 59(9) of the Criminal Justice (Northern Ireland) Order 2008, substituting words in article 21(2) of the Road Traffic (Northern Ireland) Order 1995http://www.legislation.gov.uk/def/legislation/NorthernIrelandAct identifies the legislation type “Act of the Northern Ireland Assembly”A URI identifies the same item or resource across legislation.gov.uk. Whatever part of our data set you use, a given URI will always refer to the same thing.
All our URIs start with http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ and follow a consistent URI scheme. You can find out more about the URIs for each type of data (legislation, versions and effects) in the section linked above for that type, and about the scheme in general in the URI scheme reference section of the guide.