ELI testimonials

ELI implementation in EU Member States

Vasiliki Ntalakou, Supreme Civil and Criminal Court of Greece

"ELI is implemented in Greece via the National Codification Portal (NCP) project. NCP is the electronic system for Better Regulation, aimed at shaping principles and providing the means for improving the quality of regulations and their production processes. It also serves as the digital hub for legislation and codification (both legislative and administrative). The primary goal of the project is to provide citizens, the Greek legal community as well as third parties with direct and free access to all legislative and regulatory texts currently in force. NCP aligns with the corresponding legislative portals of the European Union (EUR-Lex) and other Member States (N-Lex) while also implementing ELI Pillar 3 standards. Vocabulary semantics are based on EuroVoc and are enriched with legal vocabulary derived from previous efforts.
In this framework, ELI benefits Greece by serving as a unique identifier for legislation, compatible with existing technological standards, which is readable by both humans and machines. It will give Greek legislation on the NCP a unique way to be referenced across different legal systems, giving structural data that can be taken forward at European level. The metadata embedded in the NCP webpage can be exchanged automatically and efficiently with other European information systems. Finally, it enhances the accessibility, interoperability, reusability and transparency of Greek legislative information."

Susana Gómez, Official State Gazette National Agency (BOE)

“The Spanish legal system is complex and diverse, comprising rules corresponding to different territorial levels: state, regional (the autonomous communities) and local. Each of these territorial levels has its own official journal and its own legislative information system, so interoperability was something difficult to achieve. This situation has changed thanks to ELI.
Once the different Spanish administrations have entirely implemented ELI, all of them will have a common way to identify legal resources online and a common set of metadata. Those elements are the foundation for efficient interoperability among the different Spanish legal information systems and with the European ones too. This way, it will be easier to develop new and better services for citizens and legal practitioners.
Instead of creating a system from scratch that could help us improve interoperability, ELI provided a fully designed solution that only needed to be adapted to our specific needs."

Ostap Graljuk, Official Gazette of Republic of Croatia

"ELI enables every law, regulation, decree, or other legal act to have a permanent, unique, and globally recognisable identifier. Thanks to standardised metadata such as type of act, date, institution, number, and language, it also improves the search for and access to documents. By applying the ELI system, Croatian legal documentation becomes compatible with European legal standards, ensuring EU-level interoperability. In addition, the ELI number makes legal acts machine readable, supporting the digital transformation of legislation."

Donatienne Spiteri, Legislation Unit, Office of the State Advocate, Ministry for Justice, Malta

"ELI has contributed to the democratisation of legislation in Malta, facilitating a citizen and human centric approach to legislation. Following the implementation of ELI Pillar II the Client Notification Portal was developed, enabling users to follow legislation and/or keywords and be notified when legal activity (typically an amendment) occurs. The Client Self-Care Portal therefore provides a personalised service to end-users, supporting the legal and judicial communities and serving the public at large more efficiently.
The metadata collected for the purposes of the ELI ontology was also used to construct the Timeline of the Laws of Malta, which visually presents the history of each and every chapter of Maltese legislation. The Timeline of the Laws of Malta not only preserves and brings to life our legal heritage (some chapters date back to the 1800s) but also provides access to the different versions or points-in-time of consolidated legislation, facilitating access for both legal professionals and citizens.
ELI has also levelled up our system, moving from a silo approach to legislation to an inter-relational approach to legislation. Thanks to the ELI ontology, all legal instruments and document types within the system are interlinked, creating a web of connections, while also enriching the system with metadata. By introducing ELI metadata properties such as has_basic_act, amends, repeals and commenced_by, users are now aware of the legal activity triggered by a particular publication, providing more legal certainty and facilitating navigation of the legislative ecosystem."

ELI implementation in other European countries

Marsela Xhepa, Official Publications Center of Albania

"ELI acts as a consistent identification system for legislation, enabling reliable referencing via HTTP URIs. It provides the ability to find structured legislation. It supports transparency and reuse, e.g. for service development and scientific research. It enables applications to work with data, such as legislative timeline builders or legal analysis tools."

Nina Radojević, Official Gazette of Serbia

"ELI is a highly valuable and reliable system that contributes to legal certainty. One of the main benefits brought about by the implementation of ELI in the Legal and Information System of the Republic of Serbia is the stability of links to the regulations of the Republic of Serbia. This allows users to consistently access either the currently valid version of a regulation or, when necessary, a version that was in force at a specific point in time.
Additionally, the stability of the links has enabled, among other things, their integration into the websites of state institutions, thereby ensuring consistent citation and referencing of legal texts across public platforms.
ELI, with its metadata, has also provided excellent cross-referencing of legal acts within the Legal and Information System of the Republic of Serbia, ensuring smooth navigation and quick access to the relevant legal documents published in the Official Gazette of the Republic of Serbia."

Leonore Leresche, Swiss Federal Chancellery/Center of Official Publications

"The introduction of the ELI standard in Switzerland has facilitated access to and the reuse of data published on the publication platform for federal law (Fedlex). By assigning clear and permanent identifiers to files and the metadata describing them, we ensure that both humans and machines can comb through, evaluate, relink and (re)use this data.
Furthermore, as the ELI standard has been adopted by several European countries and the European Union, Switzerland can share its legislative data with them in a common and interoperable format. Swiss legislation is therefore becoming more visible at European level.
Finally, ELI was developed by the Publications Office for official publications, so it can be easily integrated into legal systems: it is flexible enough to respond and adapt to the specific characteristics of each country, such as multilingualism in Switzerland."