Structured Product Labeling (SPL)

Structured Product Labeling is the FDA's XML standard for publishing drug labeling documents such as indications, dosage, warnings, contraindications, ingredients, and packaging. openFDA serves 261,996 SPL label records as JSON with section-level text arrays and weekly refresh.

In this catalog it appears concretely: - openFDA Drug Label API (Structured Product Labeling) (tagging) — tagged 'drug-labels', 'spl' and 'content-enrichment'. - openFDA Drug Label API — its data_formats include 'spl_xml_source'.

Conventions decide whether two sources join; ignore them and every reconciliation step — calendar alignment, unit conversion, entity matching — lands on your team instead of the vendor's.

The failure mode is concrete: the label appears in a listing, the delivered files tell a different story, and the gap surfaces mid-project when fixing it is most expensive.

82.4% of the 1,744 cataloged datasets are free to access, and openFDA Drug Label API (Structured Product Labeling) lets you inspect the real artifact before any budget is committed.

Treat every claim of this attribute as testable:

1. Read openFDA Drug Label API (Structured Product Labeling)'s tag list — 'drug-labels', 'spl', 'content-enrichment' — then confirm the delivered artifact matches before you license anything.
2. Open openFDA Drug Label API and confirm its data_formats list 'spl_xml_source' before comparing the delivered files against the delivered artifact before paying for a commercial equivalent.
3. Pin down update cadence in writing. Across this catalog, 22.6% of 1,744 datasets refresh daily and 64 still arrive only through a manual request form, so ask exactly how fresh each release is.
4. Check whether definitions are verified at all. Field definitions are verified for 1495 of 1,744 datasets (85.7%), and any source you license should meet that bar.
5. Price the delivery route before the license. In this catalog bulk download is the most common access method (725 datasets) ahead of official APIs (574), and 379 sources still require scraping — a maintenance cost that lands on you, not the vendor.

See the term applied to real records: drug-retail data.

Adjacent concepts worth reading next: - Drug cash price - National Drug Code (NDC) - openfda apis