The National Archives (TNA) contracts TSO to operate, maintain and develop the world-leading, high-profile and authoritative Legislation Publishing Service which embraces cutting edge technology. The platform includes:
- www.legislation.gov.uk - publicly accessible website
- publishing.legislation.gov.uk - platform for submission, registration and approval of legislation to the UK Statute Book (and onward to the website and in print)
- editorial.legislation.gov.uk - for updating and revising legislation
- Development of a research platform that will enable interrogation of the complex and substantial legislation dataset.
The challenge
The challenge was to deliver a high-quality public service for people who need to consult, cite and freely access legislation on the web and to expose the UK's Statute Book as data, for people to interrogate, re-purpose and exploit in a wide variety of ways.
The legislation publishing workflows enable content to be captured, transformed, enriched and disseminated quickly and simply in a variety of formats. TSO’s robust single-source publishing platform captures legislation in a structured way and transforms it to XML to enable simultaneous publishing on the new website, in print and as machine-readable data. Utilising our transformational services, a repository of over 9 million documents is now available on the website in HTML, Akoma Ntoso and PDF formats that are dynamically generated from the underlying XML source.
We also use TSO’s Data Enrichment Service (DES) to semantically mark-up and enrich the data to assist with the creation of legislation update tasks used in the Editorial service and for ingestion to the Linked Data platform.
Legislation.gov.uk, was one of the first government services to fully meet the linked data principles advocated by the Public Sector Transparency Board and is the first site of its kind in the world, transforming public and professional access to legislation data. Uniquely the site brings together the application of legislation from across all four UK jurisdiction.
The carefully developed user interface allows users to fully contextualise the legislation they are viewing for the first time. Users can interrogate legislation using search engines, view original documents, and see legislation dating back to 1267 from an ‘enacted’ and ‘enforced’ perspective, as well as how it has evolved over time. Users can choose between formats and link precisely to the section of the legislation they need, thanks to an innovative approach to naming elements of legislation.
Since the initial launch in 2010, legislation. gov.uk has had to adapt rapidly to changes in the legislative landscape, not least due to the impact of the UK withdrawal from the European Union and new and amending legislation published during the Coronavirus pandemic.
Under Schedule 5 of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018, the National Archives (TNA), in its role as the Queens Printer, was bestowed increased obligations to publish retained direct EU legislation. To ensure our client fulfilled their obligations, both new and existing, and to support UK Governments goal of aiding legal certainty during EU exit, TSO established an Agile project with TNA to extract, transform, ingest and build update routines for EU legislative data.
Due to the nature of the content (data) and increased public interest in the law changes resulting from EU exit, user experience and performance testing was undertaken to gauge the impact of higher volumes of traffic and data. As a result, the user interface was improved to provide more guidance to users, architecture optimised to ensure the expected increase of traffic did not disrupt the service and applications adapted to enable the publishing and updating of data migrated.
To capture ongoing revisions made to EU legislation, a daily routine was developed to extract updated EU legislation and transform the source XML content to the Crown Legislation Mark-up Language schema.
Key services provided:
- Digital consultancy
- Web design, development and build
- Content creation and management (including Information Architecture)
- Data management
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) (including strategy)
- User experience research and testing
- Agile project methodology
- Hosting implementation, management and support
- Testing
The results:
- A robust website receiving over 500 million requests per month on average (over 16.5M per day)
- Simultaneous access to human and machine-readable formats dynamically created from a single format independent source
- A Publishing service that transforms thousands of documents into a single electronic format through TSO’s Transformation Services
- A Data Enrichment Service that semantically marks-up data
- An Editorial platform for the updating of revised legislation
- A complex data set that continues to grow and is influence by changes in the legal landscape
John Sheridan, Digital Director at The National Archives said:
"We are extremely proud of what has been achieved, it really is a world first and an exemplar for what can be achieved with open data if it is approached correctly. Third parties are already building mobile device and other online applications that use the data and API we created. There is a vast community accessing one dataset, in different ways, through different means, freely and easily. That is exactly what we wanted."
