EU Publications Office

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ELI coordinator

Business coordination: Maria Westermann, unit "EUR-Lex and legal information"

Technical coordination: Marc Küster, unit "Common data repository"

For information, contact: OP-ELI-MAILBOX@publications.europa.eu​​ .

ELI implementation overview

URI template for European Union legislation

http://data.europa.eu/eli/{typedoc}/{year}/{naturalnumber}/oj

ELI uses HTTP URIs to specifically identify all online legal information officially published across Europe. These URIs are formally described using URI templates (RFC 6570​​ ).

Example of the URI pattern applied by the EU Publications Office

Scope of ELI

The Publications Office implements URI templates for:

• All acts published in the Official Journal, series L, in particular:
  • Directives (including implementing and delegated directives)
  • Regulations (including implementing and delegated regulations)
  • Decisions (including implementing and delegated decisions)
  • International agreements
  • Opinions and recommendations (under development)
• Corrigenda
• Treaties (under development)
• Consolidated legislation of the base acts in the scope of ELI

Template definitions

At this state, the following templates are already defined:

1. Directives: http://data.europa.eu/eli/{typedoc}/{year}/{naturalnumber}/oj with typedoc either dir or dir_impl or dir_del.
   • ELIs with dir can be used as an alias for the corresponding ELI with dir_impl or dir_del.
2. Regulations: http://data.europa.eu/eli/{typedoc}/{year}/{naturalnumber}/oj with typedoc either reg or reg_impl or reg_del
   • Regulations with a resource type reg_adopt_internation are constructed with the typedoc reg.
3. Decisions: http://data.europa.eu/eli/{typedoc}/{year}/{naturalnumber}/oj with typedoc either dec or dec_impl or dec_del
   • Decisions with a resource type dec_entscheid or dec_adopt_internation are constructed with the typedoc dec.
4. International agreements: http://data.europa.eu/eli/{typedoc}/{year}/{natural_number} with typedoc corresponding to one of the specific types of international agreements: agree_internation, agree_amend, arrang, convention, declar, exch_let, memorandum_underst, minutes, prot(protocols with a resource type agree_prot are constructed with the typedoc prot).
   • As international agreements have no natural number of their own, the {year} and {natural_number} corresponds to the year and natural_number of the decision or regulation to which the agreement is attached, if applicable including the seqnumber (cf. below).
   • In the absence of a decision or regulation linked to an international agreement, mainly in historical cases up to 1983, the date of publication is used in place of the natural_number. In this case the "number" is composed of month and day, with the day in two positions, zero-padded if needed.
5. Other typedoc values for the typedoc component are taken from the resource type authority table​​ and generally correspond to the resource type already available on the notices of the acts, with the simplifications or exceptions listed above for the most common types and the following additional ones:
   • Recommendations with a resource type reco or reco_adopt_internation are constructed with the typedoc reco.
   • Rules of procedure with a resource type proc_rules or proc_internal are constructed with the typedoc proc_rules.
   • Acts with a resource type notice, information, announcements or communication are constructed with the typedoc notice.
6. Corrigenda: http://data.europa.eu/eli/{typedoc}/{year}/{natural_number}/corrigendum/{pub_date}/oj with typedoc the resource type of the corrected act and pubdate the date of publication of the corrigendum in the Official Journal.
   • In the past multiple corrigenda of the same act were published on the same day in exceptional cases. In this case seqnumber is used to distinguish them: http://data.europa.eu/eli/{typedoc}/{year}/{natural_number}/corrigendum/{pub_date}/{seqnumber}/oj. In this case http://data.europa.eu/eli/{typedoc}/{year}/{natural_number}/corrigendum/{pub_date}/oj will list all applicable corrigenda of that day.
   • http://data.europa.eu/eli/{typedoc}/{year}/{natural_number}/corrigendum lists all corrigenda of a given act
7. Consolidated legislation: http://data.europa.eu/eli/{typedoc}/{year}/{naturalnumber}/{start-date} with typedoc the resource type of the consolidated legislation. start-date indicates the day of entry into force of the last amendment introduced in the consolidation in ISO format, e.g. http://data.europa.eu/eli/dec/2009/496/2012-07-12​​ .
   • If there is no consolidated version on the date, the nearest consolidation in the past to the date given will be returned, or the base act if no consolidation exists yet. If the date given is before the date of publication of the base act, an error is returned.
   • If for a given date, there are not-yet consolidated modifiers or corrigenda for that act, a list of these corrigenda and/or modifiers will be returned.

Ambiguous natural numbers

Before the introduction of the unique numbering in 2015 for OJ-L two or more acts of the same type could sometimes be published with the same natural number in the same year. In order to avoid conflicts the natural_number will include a sequence number in that case, e. g. http://data.europa.eu/eli/dec/2014/445(1)/oj. The ELI without the sequence number will then return the list of all corresponding acts sharing the same natural number. For example http://data.europa.eu/eli/dec/2009/912(1)/oj​​ and http://data.europa.eu/eli/dec/2009/912(2)/oj​​ . In this case http://data.europa.eu/eli/dec/2009/912/oj​​ returns a list of the two ambiguous decisions.

Subdivisions

In all of the templates one or more subdivisions can be inserted after the natural number to indicate the subdivisions of the text in the form of http://data.europa.eu/eli/{typedoc}/{year}/{naturalnumber}{/subdivision*}/oj (i.e. the subdivision element can occur multiple times). This can be for example a given article or article and paragraph such as http://data.europa.eu/eli/dir/2000/31/art_1/par_2/oj.

Note that at this stage the URIs will still return the full act. Developments to resolve the URIs to the appropriate subdivision are planned.

Language variants or specific file formats

All of these templates can be used in combination with a {language} or {language}/{format}, e. g. http://data.europa.eu/eli/dir/2000/31/oj/fra or http://data.europa.eu/eli/dir/2000/31/oj/fra/pdf.

Abstract ELIs

Act ELIs ending in neither /oj nor a concrete date are abstract ELIs. Abstract ELIs such as http://data.europa.eu/eli/dec/2009/496​​ will (in descending priority)

• return the act as published in the Official Journal, if it has never been corrected or modified;
• give a list of non-consolidated corrigenda and/or modifiers in addition to the latest consolidation or base act, if they exist;
• redirect to the latest available consolidation.

Partial ELIs

In many cases ELIs can be abbreviated into so-called partial ELIs. In this case the result will typically be a list of acts meeting given criteria:

• http://data.europa.eu/eli/{typedoc}: list all acts of this given resource type (excluding corrigenda)
• http://data.europa.eu/eli/{typedoc}/oj: list all acts of this given resource type (excluding corrigenda) in their OJ version
• http://data.europa.eu/eli/{typedoc}/{year}: list all acts of this given resource type with a date of document in the given year (excluding corrigenda)
• http://data.europa.eu/eli/{typedoc}/{year}/oj: list all acts of this given resource type with a publication date in the given year (excluding corrigenda) in their Official Journal version
• http://data.europa.eu/eli//{year}: list all acts with a date of document in the given year (excluding corrigenda)
• http://data.europa.eu/eli/{year}/oj: list all acts with a publication date in the given year (excluding corrigenda) in their Official Journal version

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Last update: 26/08/2021