Wikidata:Property proposal/European Legislation Identifier
European Legislation Identifier (EU)
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| Description | EU legislation identifier for documents published by the EU, its member states and other (non-EU) countries |
|---|---|
| Represents | European Legislation Identifier (Q5412779) |
| Data type | URL |
| Example 1 | directive on open data and the re-use of public sector information (Q98399993)→http://data.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/1024/oj |
| Example 2 | Capital Requirements Directives (Q1034661)→http://data.europa.eu/eli/dir/2013/36/oj |
| Example 3 | Solvency II Directive (Q1255619)→http://data.europa.eu/eli/dir/2009/138/oj |
| Example 4 | Swiss Federal Constitution (Q30921)→https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/1999/404/de |
| Example 5 | Federal Constitutional Law (Q1005391)→https://ris.bka.gv.at/eli/bgbl/1930/1/P0/NOR11001371 |
| Source | |
| URL match pattern | ^https?:\/\/[A-Za-z0-9\-_\.\~]+\/eli\/[A-Za-z0-9\-_\.\~\/]+ |
| See also | European Case Law ID (P3570) |
| Single-value constraint | no |
| Distinct-values constraint | yes |
| Wikidata project | WikiProject European Union (Q10858397) |
Motivation
[edit]This is an important identifier for EU legislation.--So9q (talk) 10:43, 18 October 2024 (UTC)
Discussion
[edit]
Support Arpyia (talk) 08:36, 19 October 2024 (UTC)- What makes you think that this is the identifer for the document and not 32013L0036? Does the European Union have a documentation that says that "dir" is part of the name of the identifer? ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 20:26, 21 October 2024 (UTC)
- It is the document type in the implementation by EU institutions. See https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/8159b75d-5efc-11e8-ab9c-01aa75ed71a1. French ELI ids look like this: http://legifrance.gouv.fr/eli/loi/2014/10/13/2014-1170/jo/texte and the general prefix seems to be: {typedoc}/{year}/{natural_number}/ followed by implementation specific endings e.g. "http://data.europa.eu/eli/{typedoc}/{year}/{natural_number}/oj <- canonical ELI to identify a directive or regulation in EU" So9q (talk) 09:14, 22 October 2024 (UTC)
Notified participants of WikiProject European Union, @Ainali, Belteshassar: Redoing the ping because it requires a signature after it. Samoasambia ✎ 14:33, 22 October 2024 (UTC)
Weak oppose I'm not really sure why would we need this property because we already have CELEX number (P476) (it's the "32013L0036" ChristianKl mentioned) and work available at URL (P953) where we could add the ELI URL. P953 is useful because it is used e.g. by Template:Cite Q (Q22321052). Samoasambia ✎ 14:33, 22 October 2024 (UTC)
- European Legislation Identifier is basically a common URL and metadata format for laws in EU member states and the EU itself. Here's a few examples: http://data.finlex.fi/eli/sd/1734/4, http://data.europa.eu/eli/dir/2013/36/oj, https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/eli/loi/2023/4/14/2023-270/jo/texte, https://www.retsinformation.dk/eli/lta/2014/1603. Some of the URLs are actual pages and some of them just redirects. Unfortunately there does not seem to be any central domain from which you could be redirected to the right national database, so ELI properties would have to be done separately for each country (and the EU itself). Samoasambia ✎ 15:09, 22 October 2024 (UTC)
Strong support Such a property would be very useful, even if there's no single URI scheme for every ELI implementation. Personally, I would prefer a single ELI property over database-specific (country-specific) properties, since the ELI URI is an identifier in the first case, a locator only in second. Furthermore, every assigned ELI basically refers to a single European standard; additionally, countries are free to define multiple URI schemes for their ELIs (see, for example, Denmark's ELI schemes). Thus, I've felt free to re-activate this proposal. I've added some national legislation ELIs as examples. Additionally, I've changed the "single-value constraint" to "negative", since one legal source may have multiple ELIs assigned (see, for example, https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/eli/loi/2004/7/9/ECOX0300083L/jo/texte and its alias https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/eli/loi/2004/7/9/2004-669/jo/texte). --Fl.schmitt (talk) 09:18, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
- Pinging @Samoasambia and @ChristianKl to notify about the re-activation. Would be nice to hear your opinions about the modified proposal. Fl.schmitt (talk) 14:45, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
- Comment The datatype should be URL and not external-id then? ArthurPSmith (talk) 15:13, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
- @ArthurPSmith - Good question – to be honest, even using the Help I'm not sure which to choose. Maybe URL would be better since there's no universal ELI formatter URL. It would look like
http://$1or at leasthttp://$1/eli/$2(I suppose the second example isn't a valid formatter URL at all) which doesn't make much sense for me. Fl.schmitt (talk) 18:29, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
- @ArthurPSmith - Good question – to be honest, even using the Help I'm not sure which to choose. Maybe URL would be better since there's no universal ELI formatter URL. It would look like
- I see why this is an idea, but really correct would be an External Identifier type with $1 as the URL formatter. The ELI is an URI defined as a full URL with the only fixed part being eli in the first path part. Everything else is arbitrary. The way I understand the documentation is that this is very much on purpose to ensure that this URI can be turned into URLs completely decentralized. As soon as you have a common domain you need a common provider that resolves all those URLs together.
- The documentation also clearly says that the ELI has for Pillar 1 two purposes. The first is to create a unique identifier and the second is to allow access to the legal document. And I would interpret this as that all countries and organizations who provide an ELI for their legal documents have to fulfill at least Pillar 1 and with it these two requirements.
- As such I would also argue that the Danish example is simply bad documentation and should include https://www.retsinformation.dk as part of the URI definition. As all the examples do. The documentation of the EU example clearly includes the http scheme and domain in the ELI.
- That being said if more people think URL is the better use here then I would not oppose that decision. It might be a bit confusing having this as the only External Identifier that requires the full URI to be valid, but personally I don't think that is enough to model this worse than it could be.
- And to address some other concerns: I don't think this duplicates exactly anything. The ELI has the dual purpose of offering an unique ID and access to all the resources and in some cases it offers additional standards. For example the Danish do include the metadata and contents in RDF.
- So I think it very much makes sense to have a separate property for this. We can also see that the documentation has been updated fairly recently so I think there is real interest and resources in maintaining this system to ensure that people have a common way to access legal documents across Europe, and I think we would be remiss if we do not add this identifier to Wikidata with a specific property.
- Kordishal (talk) 07:11, 23 September 2026 (UTC)
- Support as URL identifier (current proposal template seems to have adopted this). Note some of the URL's listed are http and some are https. ArthurPSmith (talk) 21:03, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
Neutral Interesting idea, Fl.schmitt! I think this could be useful, but on the other hand, it might just duplicate work available at URL (P953) and national IDs like Irish Statute Book ID (P8726). I'll want to know what others think about this proposal. Notified participants of WikiProject European Union. Samoasambia ✎ 08:41, 9 September 2026 (UTC)
- @Samoasambia: Yes, it's difficult to separate between those properties. In most cases, the ELI URI acts as URL, too, but as far as I see, this is not required by the ELI standard. I would assume that the ELI URI will be forwarded to the actual URL where the work is available. So I think there's no duplicate to work available at URL (P953). Regarding existing national IDs: it's true that, for example, France uses its NOR system numbers (see NOR system (Q3509146)) as part of their ELI, but this information isn't sufficient to "construct" the ELI without knowing the exact national ELI URI scheme. Especially, it may depend on the specific "Government gazette" where the text was published. One additional point: the ELI isn't just a Locator or "shortcut" to access the full text of legal texts, but also the key to retrieve metadata. So, it's consumed not only by humans to access the text, but also by crawlers to collect structured metadata. Defining, providing and syncing metadata is an important part of the ELI standard, although it's not mandatory, and many participating countries have just implemented the URI part of the ELI standard. Fl.schmitt (talk) 09:19, 9 September 2026 (UTC)
- Strong support as per my other comment and with the caveat that I would prefer the creation as an External identifier with URL formatter $1. – The preceding unsigned comment was added by Kordishal (talk • contribs) at 07:12, 23 September 2026 (UTC).
- Support --Printstream (talk) 23:06, 8 October 2026 (UTC)