C: Mandate

Definition: A specific warrant which requires the resource to be created or provided.

Obligation: Recommended.

What is this element?

A warrant or mandate is a legal 'instrument' such as an Act, Regulation, other secondary legislation such as Rules, or rulings or binding determinations by statutory authorities (such as Court cases), or a bylaw.

Agencies will have some mandate for the documents they publish and the services they provide, otherwise they would not be authorised to spend that money.

For Agency records, this element is used to describe the legal basis under which an agency is established or operates. Reference is to the actual 'instrument' not the Gazette or other source in which it is published. The content of the mandate element will usually be a reference to a specific Act, Regulation, Rule or Case. Enter the official name of the act, rule, regulation or court case using generally accepted legal notation. It could also be a URI pointing to an online version of the legal instrument in question.

If this information is published, it is a useful search criterion for users wanting information about specific legal instruments or cases. This information is useful to searchers wanting to know more about the background to a service.

Qualifiers

Element refinements

• act - A reference to a specific Act of Parliament which requires the creation or provision of the resource.
• regulations - A reference to a specific regulation which requires the creation or provision of the resource.
• rules - the specific rule or bylaw which requires the resources to be created or provided
• case - A reference to a specific case which requires the creation or provision of the resource.

Encoding Schemes

URI - Uniform Resource Identifier for online or electronic resources. This includes the other schemes "Uniform Resource Locator" (URL) and "Uniform Resource Names" (URN).

Enter a URI in full, i.e. you must include the part before the colon as it identifies the scheme being used, e.g. http://.

See: RFC2396: Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax, August 1998 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt

Examples

Note - in these examples the square brackets are the normal format and do not indicate an encoding scheme.