European Legislation Identifier


The European Legislation Identifier provides, among others, a solution to uniquely identify and access national and European legislation online. This will guarantee easier access, exchange and reuse of legislation for public authorities, professional users, academics and citizens. ELI paves the way for a semantic web of legal gazettes and official journals

Elements of ELI

ELI uses URI Templates
that carry semantics both from a legal and an end-user point of view.
Each Member State will build its own, self-describing URIs using the described components as well as taking into account their specific language requirements.
All the components are optional and can be selected based on national requirements and do not have a pre-defined order.
To enable the exchange of information the chosen URI template must be documented using the URI template mechanism.
Example:

Metadata

In addition to HTTP URIs uniquely identifying legislation ELI encourages the use of relevant metadata elements to further describe it. Annex, section 2 fully specifies the corresponding recommended and optional elements and their underlying ontology)

RDFa

ELI invites participating Member States to embed these metadata elements into the webpages of their Legal Information Systems using RDFa.