LEOS
A tool facilitating the drafting of legislative texts
When is this solution for you?
You are dealing with the editing or publication of legal texts. You are looking for an easy to use editing tool that provides guidance and quality control for writers. You also need a structured format that would enable automatic processing and interoperability between IT systems.
What can we offer you?
Drafting new legislation is a complex and time-consuming process involving many actors. This process, with increasing pan-European dimensions, can be made easier with LEOS, a free tool that facilitates the editing/reviewing of legislative texts and generates legislation produced in a format supporting interoperability between European institutions. LEOS enables users to create and draft legislative acts via a web user interface, where the document content is stored in an XML format.
While LEOS has been developed to support the drafting of legislation by the European Commission services (i.e. proposals for directives, regulations and autonomous acts), now also public administrations can download and adapt the code to meet their own specific requirements. The code is available under the free European Union Public Licence (EUPL).
In September 2018, a new version LEOS Pilot 2.0.0 has been released. It includes several security and version management improvements, and also a new feature - annotations.
This means the possibility to:
- add comments & highlights using annotations;
- add suggestions on a part of text with the feature to accept and reject them or not.
While using LEOS Pilot 2.0.0, please note that the current template support is still the Ordinary Legislative Procedure of the European Union.
Our solution at a glance
Read the LEOS presentation.
Check out the LEOS leaflet.
Get started
To learn how to compile and run the tool on your local machine without external dependencies, please refer to the README file included in the release.
Is this solution open source?
Yes
Any questions?
Contact the LEOS team at the European Commission.
Contact the Interoperability Unit of DG Informatics (please use the subject line ‘LEOS’).
More detailed information
Visit the LegIT action page.
Read about LEOS on Joinup.
Who is already using this solution?
Ministry of the Presidency, Relations with the Parliament and Democratic Memory, Spain: "At the ministry, we needed a tool to support the activities of our office responsible for the quality of drafting legal texts. We searched for open source tools used in the European Union and LEOS arose as the best option... Working with LEOS can be challenging at the beginning but once the architecture is correctly understood, it is real pleasure working with it. I would recommend other administrations and institutions to find the match between LEOS and their needs and plan the required adaptions in LEOS."
Carlos Fernandez, Project Manager
Read the full testimonial
Slovenian Government: "LEOS has superior UI design, very good TOC, DIFF. We were impressed. Your work is of great importance and also a valuable example. I remember hearing on recent conference in Brussels, that few member states are willing to experiment with LEOS, namely Greece. I think all important design decisions can be seen from LEOS. I definitely benefited from this project big time."
Mitja Guštin, Government Office for Legislation