Contains the explanation, schemas and example usage of the Open Regulation Document Standard (ORDS).
ORDS stands for Open Regulation Document Standard. It is designed for use by all UK Regulators who publish legally enforceable guidance, codes of conducts, standards and similar documents online in HTML, PDF or any other format. It can also be used by organisations who re-publish or create indexes of regulatory documents, such as the Find business regulations (FBR) service.
This standard has been developed by the Regulation Directorate (RD), part of the Department of Business and Trade, in collaboration with regulators. RD is responsible for co-ordinating regulatory reform, working to make UK regulations easier to access, and reduce the compliance costs for businesses. RD is also producing the Find business regulations (FBR) sevice on GOV.UK.
ORDS is designed to be the foundation for wider work to improve access and reuse of Regulator documents online. It aims to provide a consistent set of metadata values for documents published by Regulators that can be used to develop business-centred digital services supporting regulatory compliance, improve search engine optimisation, facilitate document collation, aid document lifecycle management and document indexing.
In an ongoing project, the Regulation Directorate is indexing regulatory documents together into one location with FBR, and introducing a metadata standard to encourage best practice publishing. We hope that this standard will be the first step in making regulator documents machine-readable, fully accessible and more standardised for ease of use by businesses, legal advisors, other government departments, and RegTech projects.
Currently, the standard is at v1.0.0, after going through a number of draft iterations. Our policy can be found at Version Management Policy. Changes will be tracked in the changelog.
We started out by investigating best practice and conventions for online publishing. We determined that there is no existing data standard designed specifically for regulatory data. We reviewed existing metadata and document mark-up standards widely used for publishing legal and official documents online including:
- Dublin Core, an international metadata standard for describing digital or physical resources.
- Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR), an entity relationship model developed by librarians, commonly used as a versioning model in legislation publishing.
- Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT), a metadata standard recommended by the Central Digital and Data Office for data interchange within government.
- European Legislation Identifier (ELI), an EU standard for identifiers and metadata used by European legislation publishers to describe legal documents online.
- Crown Legislation Mark-up Language (CLML), the XML schema developed by The National Archives to represent legislation published on www.legislation.gov.uk .
- OASIS LegalDocumentML, (formerly Akoma Ntoso), an international standard for representing legal documents in XML.
We consulted with academics and data experts who had looked at applying standards to regulation data in other contexts. This included The National Archives team responsible for publishing UK legislation on www.legislation.gov.uk and other international legislation publishers. We are creating a working group with regulators to implement and provide feedback on the standard. This, together with in-depth discussions with individual regulators has allowed us to understand the processes and challenges of document publishing as well as the practicalities of implementing and using the standard.
We have presented this standard to stakeholders through a series of Data Standards Seminars with regulators to gather feedback. We have also conducted exercises to generate sdata compliant with the standard to test the practicality of real-world implementation. Through these activities we have obtained feedback that has allowed us to revise and improve the standard.
We have undertaken significant testing of ORDS with regulatory documents. This started with an initial testing with space sector documents. This has expanded to a large-scale tagging of construction sector regulatory documents. Over 700 documents have been tagged across several formats and regulators by 3 different taggers. This test has allowed us to expand our guidance and documentation for the practical implementation of ORDS.
We have also engaged with individual regulators to understand their specific requirements, and how ORDS can be implemented. Our ongoing engagement with the Office for Product Safety and Standards (OPSS) has seen their team use ORDS to tag and index their regulatory guidance. The resulting metadata will be used in FBR, and by OPSS itself to audit and manage its library of guidance.
We are working with the Data Standards Authority (DSA) to make ORDS an official UK government standard for regulatory metadata. You can find out about this process on the Central Digital and Data Office gov.uk pages that describe how open standards for government are selected.
The majority of the properties in the ORDS standard are a restatement of properties from the Dublin Core vocabulary with a recommended implementation pattern suggested below. The four properties created specifically for ORDS are listed below:
| Property Name | Mandatory |
|---|---|
| Regulatory Topics | |
| Status | |
| Date Uploaded | |
| Related Legislation |
Dublin Core Properties:
| Property Name | Mandatory |
|---|---|
| Title | (x) |
| Identifier | (x) |
| Publisher | (x) |
| Language | |
| Format | |
| Description | |
| Date Issued | |
| Date Modified | |
| Date Valid | (x) |
| Audience | |
| Coverage | |
| Subject | |
| Type | |
| License | |
| Has Format | |
| Is Format Of | |
| Has Version | |
| Is Version Of | |
| References | |
| Is Referenced By | |
| Has Part | |
| Is Part Of | |
| Is Replaced By | |
| Replaces |
The metadata ontology can be found as:
ORDS metadata can be embedded in documents, for example using a rubric at the beginning or end of the document. Metadata could be stored in metadata files that are companions to the related document, spreadsheets or in a database. For documents published in HTML you can embed ORDS metadata properties in the file using RDFa or JSON-LD.
Contributions are welcome! Please see the CONTRIBUTING.md file for details on how to get involved. You can submit issues or pull requests to help improve the standard.
The project is licensed under the MIT license. Please see the license page for more details.