Relaton API

Fetch structured bibliographic data for standards documents via HTTP.

Early Access

The Relaton API is in early access. Some queries may return errors or incomplete results. Feedback welcome at the GitHub repository.

About the API

The Relaton API provides HTTP access to the same bibliographic data that the Ruby gems fetch locally. Given a publication identifier (e.g., RFC 8446, ISO 690:2021), it returns a structured XML record with complete metadata — title, contributors, dates, identifiers, relations, and flavor-specific extensions.

The API is read-only and requires no authentication.

Endpoint

GET https://api.relaton.org/api/v1/document

Parameters

Parameter	Type	Description
code	string (required)	The publication identifier to look up (e.g., RFC 8446, ISO 690:2021, ITU-T G.989.2)
year	string	Year of publication (e.g., 2010)
all_parts	boolean	If true, fetches all parts of a multi-part standard (default: false)
keep_year	boolean	If true, keeps the year in the identifier even when a newer edition exists (default: false)

Response Format

The API returns Relaton XML — a structured bibliographic record following the Relaton XML schema. Example response for RFC 8446:

<bibdata type="standard">
  <title format="text/plain" language="en" script="Latn">
    The Transport Layer Security (TLS) Protocol Version 1.3
  </title>
  <docidentifier type="IETF">RFC 8446</docidentifier>
  <docidentifier type="DOI">10.17487/RFC8446</docidentifier>
  <date type="published">
    <on>2018-08</on>
  </date>
  <contributor>
    <role type="author"/>
    <person>
      <name>
        <completename language="en">E. Rescorla</completename>
      </name>
      <affiliation>
        <organization>
          <name>Internet Engineering Task Force</name>
        </organization>
      </affiliation>
    </person>
  </contributor>
</bibdata>

Supported Organizations

The API supports all 28 Relaton flavors — 26 standards organizations plus DOI and ISBN identifier systems:

ISO, IEC, IETF, ITU (T/D/R), NIST, BIPM, 3GPP, IEEE, W3C, CalConnect, OGC, IHO, OASIS, CIE, OMG, UN, GB, CCSDS, IANA, XSF, IEV, DOI, ISBN, and more.

For the full list with data sources, see the Flavors page.

Rate Limits

The API is provided as a public service for standards development. Please use responsibly — cache results locally when possible, and avoid bulk queries in tight loops.

Try It

Enter a publication identifier below to see the response:

Reference

Year (optional)

All parts Keep year

Try: