ELI and ELI-DL for greater interoperability of legislation

In the context of our European Legislation Identifier (ELI) action, the ELI Taskforce has recently released two important interoperability models: a new version (v1.3) of the ELI ontology and the first stable version of the ELI-DL (ELI for Draft Legislation) ontology.

The ELI ontology allows official legislation publishers to share structured descriptive metadata of legislation by using a common model, agreed upon by all ELI stakeholders. ELI also offers structured and persistent URI web identifiers for each legislation.

Version 1.3 is the fourth version of the model since 2014. It introduces a new link to indicate that a national legislation “ensures the implementation of” an EU regulation, and new metadata to capture the type of legislation subdivision or the “counter signature” of an act; it also introduces structural improvements on its FRBR structure.

The ELI-DL ontology enables the semantic annotation of bills, or legislative projects pages published in the portals of official journals or Parliaments. It is an independent and optional extension of the ELI ontology. ELI-DL enables the description of the Legislation Process, subdivided into Legislative Activities, yielding the Draft Legislation Work and its amendments. It provides stable URIs for preparatory documents and legislative activities, which can be cited in further events and documents.

A key feature of ELI-DL is its ability to state the foreseeable impacts of a draft legislation on existing legislation, thus providing data consumers a way to get early alerts on potential impacts of a legislative project.

The ELI-DL effort started in 2018, and this first stable release is an important milestone that will lead to implementation of this model in the web portals of ELI stakeholders.

ELI is a joint effort, since 2012, of national official journals across EU Member States and of the Publications Office of the EU to improve visibility and interoperability of legislation data by using web of data technologies. More information about the specification, tools and implementations can be found in the ELI Register on EUR-Lex and on Joinup.