European Legislation Identifier (ELI)

Advancing the access, shareability and interoperability of legal information published through regional, national European and global legal information systems
You represent a governmental legal information system: you seek a tool to facilitate interoperable and inclusive legal information sharing. You are a legal professional working in either national, European or global law context and you seek access to legal information that is organised and displayed in an efficient and coherent manner. You are a pioneer into business venture for legislation access solution. You are a citizen with a specific interest in regional, national or EU law or taking legal action.
ELI solution
The European Legislation Identifier offers a consistent and elaborated mechanism to identify, reference and reuse legal information on the web. Consequently, it sets out good conditions for developing sustainable added value for legislation related services. By promoting linking and reuse of legal data, ELI provides cost-saving solutions for publishers while simultaneously increasing the quality and reliability of data. On top of that, ELI contributes to improving transparency and accountability within public administrations as the exchange of data becomes greater and interconnections between different sources of information domains develop faster.
ELI is built on three pillars:
- assignment of universal resource identifiers
- description of metadata elements
- sharing of metadata in machine-readable format
This ensures flexibility in using ELI as a tool for legislation data exchange globally. Thanks to its flexibility, not only can ELI be adjusted to various regional, national and EU legal systems, but also to modified resources, such as codes, amendments, consolidations and repealed acts.
ELI annotation tool
The ELI annotation tool is an open source tool developed by the ELI Taskforce to enable the labelling of different legal resources, description and publishing of metadata in machine-usable format. It also enables the generation of associated controlled vocabularies and their publication in SKOS format. The ELI annotation tool is fully configurable and easy to use and customise for the user’s needs.
ELI validator
The compliance of ELI metadata with the ELI ontology requirements can be assessed online by using the ELI validator. The validator provides ELI users with a validation report of the web link that is using ELI metadata to locate legislation information units. The ELI validator is online service that is free and simple to use.
/isa2/file/discoverelitheeuropeanlegislationidentifier_enDiscover ELI, the European Legislation Identifier
Contact the ELI team.
ELI has been adopted by 12 governmental legislation publishers.