ELI and Parseable URIs

Hi,

As promised I’m sharing some of the issues (not exhaustive) that influenced the development of ELI identifiers as flexible rather than fixed and parseable.

There are several issues that are key here so I've created a separate documents (attached). All information is on legislation as this is all that ELI is concerned with although I doubt there is any less complexity for other legal document types. Just to be clear I'm not necessarily suggesting that the eventual LegaLCiteM standard should follow the ELI pattern exactly but highlighting the issues to add to the information available for consideration in the creation of the citation standard.

A couple of other things to note:

ELI is not just an identifier nor is it intended as a citation/reference scheme. It’s designed as a mechanism to make it easier for legislative publishers to exchange information. ELI consists of several things that are designed to be used together (although you don’t have to implement everything at once) – a URI scheme, a model for organising legislation versions (based on FRBR) and a set of metadata to be added to legislation content (RDFa is the recommended encoding).

When ELI was initially proposed the first draft of the identifier scheme was a lot more prescriptive. However when investigated it became clear that following this route would make it unlikely that anyone would implement it. The identifying features and the way the FRBR model needed to be implemented were very different in the various countries. There is a significant lack of resources to make major changes to national website as well as the practical barriers (other systems may depend on legislation websites) and political considerations (who gets to tell who how to build their website!) so having something flexible and light-weight was essential in order to get anyone to consider implementation.

Concerning the issue of parseability, this wasn’t really considered when the ELI identifier scheme was created. ELI is a URI scheme, it’s not a parseable reference or a URN. The expectation is that the ELI URI will be supported directly by the legislation publisher’s website. Any resolution will be carried out by them (i.e. the web server is carrying out any resolution). This is a reflection of the fact that the way most people find legislation is via a search engine, like Google, which will have indexed the actual webpage URL. This URL will be the reference that most people will use when citing online legislative sources.

It’s also worth noting that there is already a type of URN for legislation in use which is supported by many EU countries. Unfortunately this isn’t generally used in legislation citations or referred to directly as the interaction is via the N-Lex connectors. Each country builds a connector (a SOAP service, which is based on URN:LEX) that the EU Publications Office interact with (services may be open to other users too) which allows use of common search terms in a general portal to access national legislation websites. For details see http://eur-lex.europa.eu/n-lex/index_en.htm .

Let me know you need more explanation or if I've missed anything.

Regards,

Catherine

Catherine Tabone

Data Manager

Legislation Services

The National Archives, Kew, Richmond, Surrey TW9 4DU

+44 (0)20 8876 3444 ext. 2233
catherine.tabone@nationalarchives.gsi.gov.uk

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