Back to EUR-Lex homepage

EUR-Lex Access to European Union law

Back to EUR-Lex homepage

This document is an excerpt from the EUR-Lex website

Use quotation marks to search for an "exact phrase". Append an asterisk (*) to a search term to find variations of it (transp*, 32019R*). Use a question mark (?) instead of a single character in your search term to find variations of it (ca?e finds case, cane, care).
Search tips
Need more search options? Use the Advanced search
You are here

Publication of ELI ontology version 1.2 (November 2018)

The ELI working group published in November 2018 ELI ontology version 1.2. The ELI ontology provides a descriptive framework for structuring metadata of legislative resources and publishing them as linked data. The ELI ontology is a cornerstone of a ‘legal linked data’, as it describes relationships between national and European legislative resources.

The following improvements have been introduced into this version:

  • introduction of eli:media_type property: this property is meant to capture the technical file format of a legislation file; the existing property eli:format is kept to capture the "business" format of a file, e.g. to distinguish scanned PDF vs. electronically signed PDF;
  • introduction of new value for eli:format: eli:print_format that allows to describe the printed version of the legislation;
  • addition of link eli:is_translation_of / eli:has_translation to relate legal expressions translated from others;
  • addition of a property eli:cited_by_case_law to indicate that a legislation is being cited in a case law document. This is expected to link ELI with ECLI (European Case Law Identifier).

A detailed list of improvements can be found at: https://publications.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies​ .

ELI is based on the conceptual FRBR model (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Resources) and allows to identify with precision each conceptual level of a legislative resource (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 Taskforce. The model can also be used in different legislative systems.

More information can be found on the page of ELI ontology​ .