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.
The current version of the ELI ontology is disseminated in the following files:
- The OWL reference file of the ELI ontology
- The table of the metadata elements
- The diagrams of the ELI ontology model
- The alignment of the ELI ontology with the schema.org legal extension, in OWL and in XLSX
- The release note of the latest version of the model
For accessing all the different versions of the ontology, see the ELI version history on EU Vocabularies.
Pillar 3: Integration of ELI metadata into legislative websites
ELI metadata must be encoded either:
- In RDFa, following the W3C Recommendation of 14 October 2008 "RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing"
- In JSON-LD, following the W3C Recommendation of 16 January 2014 "JSON-LD 1.0 - A JSON- basedSerialization for Linked Data"
Implementers are free to support additional serialization formats.
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.