This document is an excerpt from the EUR-Lex website
What is the European Legislation Identifier (ELI)?
Overview
The European Legislation Identifier (ELI) is a standard that makes it easier to identify and describe legislation across Europe. It ensures that legal documents can be accessed and used by various stakeholders, including public authorities, professionals, academics, businesses and individuals. ELI allows for seamless access to legislation across borders and ensures that it is understandable to both humans and machines.
Key features
- Standardised identification: provides a uniform way to manage and navigate legal documents.
- Metadata description: uses a common vocabulary to represent metadata about national and EU legislation, covering aspects like purpose, scope, relationships and legal basis.
- Cross-border compatibility: ensures legislation is easily accessible and interoperable across different countries.
ELI principles
ELI is built on the following 4 pillars that can be implemented together or progressively * :
* In older documentation and resources, the ELI Pillars 1, 2, 3 and 4 are sometimes referred to as Pillars I, II, III and IV respectively.
Pillar 1: Identification of legal information
Every legal text is assigned a universal resource identifier (URI) that enables users to identify and access legislation in a consistent way. This unique URL can be used in documents or even published online.
In the ELI framework, a recommended set of URI template components has been drawn up. These components can be arranged in any order of preference to generate specific URI patterns and are documented in this overview of reference URI template components . The ELI URIs defined by each of the national official journals of ELI countries and the Publications Office of the EU (ELI publishers) serve as global web identifiers of legislation. It is a unique identifier for the legislation, which is readable by both humans and computers and compatible with existing technological standards.
For the specific use of the ELI components on EUR-Lex, see: implementation of ELI by the Publications Office.
Pillar 2: Description based on metadata
Metadata is added to the legal text. It contains valuable information by describing, for example, the type of legislation, when the legislation is adopted or which jurisdiction it is subject to.
The ELI ontology defines a common data model for describing and exchanging legislation metadata online; although the primary users of the ELI model are ELI publishers, it can also be used by other organisations.
The description of legislation in ELI follows the principles of FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records).
The current version of the ELI ontology is described in the following files:
- OWL (Ontology Web Language) reference file of the ELI ontology ,
- table of the metadata elements ,
- diagrams of the ELI ontology model ,
- alignment of the ELI ontology with the Schema.org legal extension, in OWL and in XLSX ,
- release note of the latest version of the model.
The different versions of the ELI ontology are on EU Vocabularies .
Pillar 3: Publication of metadata
Legal texts are published in a format that can be distributed, reused and understood by computers.
ELI metadata must be encoded in either:
- RDFa, following the W3C Recommendation of 14 October 2008 RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing
- JSON-LD, following the W3C Recommendation of 16 July 2020 JSON-LD 1.1 A JSON-based Serialization for Linked Data .
For official journals, this means metadata can be seamlessly embedded into legislative websites. ELI publishers also have the flexibility to support additional serialisation formats. For data consumers, structured metadata can be extracted directly from the HTML pages.
Pillar 4: Synchronisation of metadata
A list of all identifiers of legal texts can be provided to ELI users who can be notified when a new identifier is created. This enables users to keep their data up to date when new legislation is introduced.
Pillar 4 is a protocol that requires ELI publishers to provide the ELI sitemap and the ELI Atom feed. The specifications can be found on the page Implementing the European legislation identifier (ELI).
The pillar also allows for creating a centralised graph of ELI data from the different countries implementing ELI.
It is essential to implement these 4 pillars (even gradually) to benefit from ELI's full potential and provide the most flexible and transparent access to legislation. When this metadata is embedded in the respective pages of official journals, legal gazettes or legal information systems, information can be exchanged automatically and efficiently by computers and humans.
To discover more about ELI, please see these resources created by the Publications Office.
Last update: 14 October 2025