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Ireland implements ELI HTTP URIs for all legislation on the Irish Statute Book

Since 1 September 2015, all legislation on the Irish Statute Book​ (eISB) can be accessed using ELI HTTP URIs.

More information about the European Legislation Identifier (ELI) schema and how it is implemented in the eISB can be found here​ .

ELI HTTP URIs for all legislation on the Irish Statute Book

Ireland took an active interest in the European Legislation Identifier (ELI) project from its introduction to the Council of the European Union Working Party on e-Law in 2011 and the subsequent adoption of the ELI Council Conclusions in 2012.

The formal project to implement ELI on the electronic Irish Statute Book​ (eISB) started following a meeting of the ELI task force in Dublin during the Irish Presidency of the EU Council in 2013.

The business case for ELI highlighted the advantage of implementing unique persistent identifiers following the ELI specifications. Therefore the initial focus was put on the implementation of the HTTP URIs.

A lengthy consultation process on the ELI URI schema was carried out internally in the Office of the Attorney General and reviews also took place with the ELI task force.

The final specifications were added as requirements to the tender document and resulting contract for legislation publishing services in 2013.

The ELI URI schema has now been applied to all legislation on the electronic Irish Statute Book (eISB), which includes over 3 500 acts, approximately 35 000 statutory instruments and almost 1 000 pre-1922 acts.

A programmatic solution at the Apache server level was employed that allowed the numerous legacy data links to be redirected to the ELI identifier.