Publications Office of the EU
ELI - EU Vocabularies
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ELI

European Legislation Identifier (ELI)

The European Legislation Identifier (ELI) is a standard that makes it easier to identify and describe legislation across Europe. It ensures that legal documents can be accessed and used by various stakeholders, including public authorities, professionals, academics, businesses and individuals. ELI allows for seamless access to legislation across borders and ensures that it is understandable to both humans and machines. For general information about ELI (governance, tools and news), and the implementation status of ELI by various stakeholders (in particular, the way ELI is implemented by the Publications Office on EUR-Lex), please consult ELI Register on EUR-Lex.

Pillar 1: Identification of legal information

In the ELI framework, a recommended set of URI template components has been drawn up. These components can be arranged in any order of preference to generate specific URI patterns and are documented in this overview of reference URI template component. The ELI URIs defined by each of the national official journals of ELI countries and the Publications Office of the EU (ELI publishers) serve as global web identifiers of legislation. It is a unique identifier for the legislation, which is readable by both humans and computers and compatible with existing technological standards.

Pillar 2: Description based on metadata

The ELI ontology defines a common data model for exchanging legislation metadata on the web; the primary users of the ELI model are the official legal publishers of EU Member States, and the model can also be used by other organisations.

The description of legislation in ELI follows the principles of FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records).

The current version of the ELI ontology is described in the following files:

For accessing all the different versions of the ontology, see the ELI version history on EU Vocabularies.

Pillar 3: Publication of metadata

ELI metadata must be encoded either in:

For official journals, this means metadata can be seamlessly embedded into legislative websites. ELI publishers also have the flexibility to support additional serialisation formats. For data consumers, structured metadata can be extracted directly from the HTML pages.

Pillar 4: Synchronisation of metadata

It is essential to implement these 4 pillars (even gradually) to benefit from ELI's full potential and provide the most flexible and transparent access to legislation. When this metadata is embedded in the respective pages of official journals, legal gazettes or legal information systems, information can be exchanged automatically and efficiently by computers and humans.

To discover more about ELI, please see these resources created by the Publications Office.

ELI ontology

  • ELI ontology and documentation
  • ELI ‘Pillar 4’ specification – Protocol to synchronise ELI metadata This specification describes the protocol that enables data users to retrieve complete sets of ELI metadata and receive daily updates.

Supporting specifications

ELI/XML

ELI/XML is an encoding of ELI metadata in an XML schema (XSD). It can be used standalone or imported into other XML documents, typically in a metadata header.

The ELI/XML schema – facilitating the integration of ELI in XML-based document workflows – is provided with a set of XML transformations to generate ELI in RDF/XML, RDFa header or HTML+RDFa. ELI/XML is not supported as a dissemination format of ELI metadata.

ELI/ELI-DL alignment with CDM ontology for EULT

In the context of the construction of the Digital European Legal Space and of the EULT - EU Law Tracker (formerly named JLP - Joint Legislative Portal), the Publications Office carries out the alignment of the CDM ontology, used by Cellar, with the ELI / ELI-DL ontology. The purpose is to enable the Publications Office to populate Cellar with data provided by the European Parliament Open Data Portal of the European Parliament.

Tools

ELI Validator

The ELI validator is an online service that checks published ELI metadata against rules derived from the ELI ontology and then produces a validation report. It helps ELI publishers ensure that their data is accurate and compliant.

ELI annotation tool

The ELI annotation tool enables legislation publishers to annotate and publish legal texts with metadata that complies with the ELI standard. This free, open-source solution is easy to install on a server, simple to use and highly customisable to your needs. It does not require any other software to work.

ELI Pillar 4 helper

The Pillar 4 helper is a tool for ELI publishers implementing the Pillar 4 specification. It is a command-line Java application that helps generate sitemaps and/or RSS feeds.

ELI extension standards

Describing draft legislation (ELI-DL)

In 2021 and 2022, ELI was updated to include a new standard called ELI-DL (European Legislation Identifier for draft legislation).

This standard helps create a structured way to share information about draft laws, making it easier to follow legislative initiatives across the EU.

ELI-Impact (ELI-I)

ELI offers an extension to the core ELI ontology, known as ELI-I, that provides a formal data model to represent the impact of legislative acts.

Publishers, such as official journals, can use ELI-I to describe in detail how amendments impact the original text or the most recent consolidated version.

This includes understanding the impacts of any text modifications, the process of analysing these impacts and how these changes update the consolidated (officially combined) version of the law. It also makes it possible to capture impacts of other sources, such as court decisions.

ELI and Schema.org

ELI also aims to make legislative metadata more visible online, particularly in large search engines. To achieve this, ELI proposed an extension to the schema.org vocabulary, which search engines use to process structured data. By using this extension, search engines can understand and present information about legislation more effectively.

Legislation can be published on websites that contain legislative information and can be marked up using the appropriate schema.org types and properties.

New N-Lex: an ELI-based project

One essential tool is N-Lex, a search interface that links to national legislation websites in each EU country and now features a new ELI-based search feature. With N-Lex, users can search for national laws in any EU language and view information from multiple countries at once. It also has additional features, such as checking the status of EU directives and viewing statistics.

The main goals of N-Lex are to:

  1. make it easier to find and browse legal texts across EU Member States;
  2. connect related national and EU laws, helping users understand how laws are linked;
  3. provide innovative tools that make it easier for both the public and businesses to use legal information.