Improved version of European Legislation Identifier ontology is now available

The European Legislation Identifier (ELI) offers a consistent and elaborated mechanism to identify, reference, and reuse legal information on the web. The ELI ontology is the backbone for a pan-European interoperable legal information system as it characterises the relationships between national and European legislative resources.

A new version of the ontology (ELI ontology v1.2) is now available and brings several improvements:

1. Capturing the technical format of files
   A new property “eli:media_type” can capture the technical file format of a legislation file; the already existing property “eli:format” is kept to capture the "business" format of a file, e.g. to distinguish a scanned PDF from an electronically signed PDF.
    
2. Indicating printed versions
   The new value “eli:print_format” allows users to describe the printed version of the legislation.
    
3. Marking translations
   Thanks to a new property “eli:is_translation_of/has_translation”, users can mark that legislation is translated from another one.  
    
4. Indicating citations
   A new property “eli:cited_by_case_law” property can indicate that a piece of legislation is being cited in a case law document.

These ontology improvements contribute to greater efficiencies in the interlinking and exchange of legal data between legal national systems. The description of legislation in ELI follows the conceptual Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records model and is compatible with existing technological standards.

The ELI Ontology version 1.2 makes it possible to identify with precision each conceptual level of a legislative resource (i.e. a whole act, a specific and provisional version of an act, a given version in a particular file format, etc.). This descriptive model is the result of collaboration and discussions within the ELI Task force, a group of governmental legislation publishers who govern the ELI standard.