search_terms
Look up officially validated German, French, Italian, or English designations of Swiss federal authorities, departments, and legal acts. Use wildcards to catch compound terms before concluding a term is absent.
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.
Leave detail at True unless you want a bare hit list. With detail=False
the API omits languageDetails, and every entry comes back with an empty
variants — id, url, status and classification, but not a single designation.
That is a hit you cannot read a term from, from a tool whose purpose is terms.
Use it to count or to filter by classification, never to answer «what is this
called».
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.
Coverage caveat: the public API serves a subset of what termdat.bk.admin.ch shows, and the Federal Chancellery confirmed on 2026-08-21 that this is deliberate — the selection follows the needs of the federal administration's translators, and no fuller coverage is planned. Entries the website lists can be missing from the API entirely: not hidden by a filter, simply not served, so no query reaches them. So «not found here» means «not in the API», never «not in TERMDAT»: say which one you mean, and point at www.termdat.ch for the difference.
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. Terms of use (Terminology Section, Federal Chancellery, 2026-08-21): reuse and republication are permitted only if the source www.termdat.ch is named, and the Terminology Section must be informed of the purpose and manner beforehand (terminologie@bk.admin.ch). | |
| 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 |