The Council welcomed the initiative of a number of Member States to develop, on a voluntary basis at the national level, the European Legislation Identifier (ELI). The Council approved on its conclusions for the 24 of September the Working party on e-Law suggestion that would mean a new unique identifier and structured metadata to reference legislation published in the official journals and legal gazettes of different legal systems.

The implementation of the European Legislation Identifier (ELI), a new unique identifier and structured metadata to reference legislation published in the official journals and legal gazettes of different legal systems, has been suggested by the Council Working party on e-Law and approved in the Council conclusions of 24 of September. According to this Council Working party, this will guarantee easier access, exchange and reuse of legislation for public authorities, professional users, academics and citizens. ELI paves the way for a semantic web of legal gazettes and official journals.

The EU Publications Office announced that fully conscious of the benefits which will result from the introduction of this new identifier and on the basis of its experience in providing state-of-the-art access to legal information, it will plan to integrate ELI as part of the EUR-Lex portal; host and maintain the register of formal descriptions of Member States’ URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) schemes; and host and maintain the referenced authority tables.

The ELI system could be implemented in each Member State on voluntary bases. The Council Working party on e-Law recommends to appoint a national ELI-co-ordinator who will be responsible for reporting on the progress of the ELI implementation; defining the applicable URI template(s) and communicating them to the Publications Office of the European Union; documenting available metadata and its relationship to the ELI metadata schema (if applicable); and sharing and disseminating information on ELI.