search_terms
Look up officially validated designations of Swiss federal authorities, departments, and legal acts in DE/FR/IT/EN from the TERMDAT database.
Instructions
Search TERMDAT for official designations of the Swiss Federal Administration.
Use this to look up the officially validated German/French/Italian/English name of an authority, department or legal act — for example to check how a body is named in another national language before citing it.
search_term is Lucene query syntax: * and ? wildcards and the ~ fuzzy
operator work. Matching is on whole words, so a compound is not found by its
parts — «Quellensteuer» does not match «Quellensteuerverordnung», but
«Quellensteuer*» does. Reach for a wildcard before concluding a term is absent.
out_language adds a target language to every entry's variants — it is purely
additive and never filters the result set. fields is a comma-separated subset
of: Terminus, Name, Abbreviation, Phraseology, Definition, Note, Context, Source,
Metadata, Country, Comment; empty means Terminus, Name, Abbreviation, Phraseology,
Definition, Note, Source. By default the search spans all 23 subject
classifications; pass classification_ids or collection_ids to narrow it
(see list_classifications / list_collections).
Scope caveat: TERMDAT holds administrative nomenclature (authority names, titles of legal acts, abbreviations), not domain vocabulary — so a term may genuinely be absent. Establish that with a wildcard retry, not from a single empty result, and never fill the gap with a guessed designation.
Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| detail | No | ||
| fields | No | ||
| in_language | No | DE | |
| max_results | No | ||
| search_term | Yes | ||
| out_language | No | ||
| collection_ids | No | ||
| classification_ids | No |
Output Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| hint | No | Set when the search returned nothing; suggests how to widen it | |
| source | No | Data: TERMDAT, terminology database of the Swiss Federal Administration, Swiss Federal Chancellery (BK), via api.termdat.bk.admin.ch. The I14Y catalogue record carries no explicit licence statement — clarify terms with the Federal Chancellery before republishing. | |
| entries | Yes | ||
| returned | Yes | ||
| truncated | Yes | True if the result hit max_results — narrow the query or raise the limit | |
| provenance | Yes | ||
| in_language | Yes | ||
| search_term | Yes | ||
| out_language | No | ||
| retrieved_at | Yes | ISO-8601 UTC timestamp |