About normly
normly is an open-source knowledge infrastructure for norms and standards. We collect publicly available regulatory documents – EU directives from EUR-Lex, German occupational safety rules from DGUV, technical rules from BAuA and open standards from bodies such as IETF and W3C – and connect them into a single, machine-readable reference graph. On top of that graph, an AI assistant answers questions with precise citations: chapter, paragraph, figure. Not a summary you have to trust, but a pointer you can verify. normly is built and maintained as a non-profit effort. The free core is held by a charitable association (normly e.V.), independent of any commercial interest by design.
AI-powered Norms and Standards, Open to Everyone
Norms and standards decide how safe a machine is, whether a building may be occupied, and which product is allowed on the market. They shape the physical world we all live in – yet most of them sit behind paywalls, scattered across dozens of portals, written in a language only specialists read fluently. We believe that knowledge which governs everyone should be accessible to everyone. The electrician in a small workshop, the safety officer in a mid-sized plant, the student preparing for her first project – they all deserve the same quality of answers as a corporation with a standards department. That is why normly exists. We make the rules that shape our world findable, understandable and verifiable – for anyone, anywhere, at no cost for the free core. AI does the heavy lifting; the sources stay transparent; the graph stays open. Knowledge about how things are done right should not be a privilege. It should be infrastructure.
Why the separation matters
The free knowledge layer belongs to normly e.V., a non-profit association. Commercial services – licensed full texts, enterprise integrations, hosted APIs – will live in a separate company. This split is deliberate: no business decision can ever close the graph, and no contributor's work can be relicensed. The server core is AGPL-3.0, SDKs and the embeddable widget are Apache-2.0, the graph data is ODbL. See our governance model for how decisions are made.
Founding team
Jan Wokittel
Founder
Tobias Haarhoff
Lead Maintainer
Andreas Wokittel
Standards Organisations Liaison
Hartmut Hardt
Legal Counsel, Standards Law
Jakob Scheidt
Head of Treasury
Our Partners
Our partners help us provide our services on a volunteer basis. Partners can support us in terms of content, technology, strategy, communication, or funding.
Get Involved
normly is built by volunteers. Here is how you can help.
Help build the reference graph, API and processing pipeline.
https://github.com/normly/web-appHelp register and classify new sources for the reference graph. The more resources we can integrate