asetustiedot

Asetustiedot is a Finnish term describing information and metadata about regulatory instruments issued by public authorities, such as laws (laki), decrees (asetus), and other formal normative acts. The concept covers structured data that identifies, describes and tracks regulatory texts and their administrative provenance. Asetustiedot serves as the foundation for organizing and reusing regulatory information in legal databases, research tools, and public information services.

Typical components of asetustiedot include the regulation’s official identifier (number and year), title, type (laki, asetus, valtioneuvoston päätös, etc.), governing jurisdiction, responsible authority or ministry, enactment date, entry into force date, and any repeal or amendment history. Additional fields may cover the official source of the text, language versions, status (in force, under revision), a concise summary, related regulations, and links to the full text. Versions and amendments are often tracked to support historical and comparative analyses.

Usage and accessibility: asetustiedot enables efficient search, retrieval, and analysis of regulatory texts. It is important for lawyers, policymakers, businesses, researchers, and citizens who need current and historical information about Finnish regulations. Official repositories such as Finlex and government data portals host regulatory texts and their metadata, providing machine-readable formats (for example, XML or JSON) to support integration with information systems.

Relation to open data and governance: asetustiedot supports transparency and public accountability by making regulatory information findable and reusable, while also posing challenges in keeping metadata up to date with frequent amendments and translations.