State Agency Official State Gazette
The European Legislation Identifier (ELI) is a European standard for the identification and description of legislation published in official journals and databases, which enables online access to legislation in a standardized format, so that it may be located, exchanged and reused across borders.
The ELI standard includes technical specifications for:
The implementation of this identifier in Spain is being addressed in a coordinated manner, through the Comisión Sectorial de Administración Electrónica (a technical coordination body of the State, the Autonomous Communities and the Local Administrations). For this reason, that Commission decided in 2017 to set up an "ELI Working Group" to study how to apply this standard to Spanish legislation.
Following the work of this group, the Commission approved at its meeting of March 13th, 2018 the "Technical Specification for the Implementation of the European Legislation Identifier in Spain (phase 1)", applicable to state and regional legislation. Subsequently, on February 24th, 2022 a new version of the Specification was approved, which includes the adaptations necessary to apply the ELI also to local legislation.
The Specification aims to establish the common guidelines required for the implementation of ELI in the Spanish context, so that the identification and description of state-, regional- and local-level legislation is carried out in a coordinated and coherent manner by the various Administrations.
In this way Spain joins the list of European countries which already apply the ELI standard (among others Denmark, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Norway, Portugal, Austria, Belgium, Poland and the United Kingdom), in addition to the European Union itself.
More information on ELI is available on the common portal https://www.elidata.es
The State and regional administrations are working to apply ELI to the legislation they publish in their various databases, using as a basis the Technical Specification for the Implementation of the European Legislation Identifier.
On the part of the General State Administration, the BOE Agency (AEBOE) began applying ELI in December 2018, and now has more than 90 000 pieces of legislation identified and described in accordance with the European standard.
In accordance with the technical specification, the AEBOE applies ELI to:
Each legal resource has a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) which uniquely and permanently identifies it on the internet.
The URIs are constructed according to the template defined by the technical specification for state and regional legislation, as shown below:
/eli/{jurisdiction}/{type}/{year}/{month}/{day}/{number}/{version}/{version_date}/{language}/{format}
The corrections of errors of legislation published in the BOE are also identified with ELI, using the following structure which is based on the URI of the corrected legislation:
/eli/{jurisdiction}/{type}/{year}/{month}/{day}/{number}/{corrigendum}/{pubdate}/{dof}{/language}/{format}
Legislation is described adapting the FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) model, distinguishing different levels:
The technical specification provides that, for each piece of legislation, two levels of legal resources will be taken into account:
All these resources are related to each other by various "eli" properties.
More information is available in section 5 of the Technical Specification for the Implementation of the European Legislation Identifier in Spain.
When consulting the Legislation database, you will find in the header of each piece of legislation the link "Permalink ELI" which contains the URI of the abstract legal resource.
Here are some examples of URIs for different types of legal forms existing in the BOE databases:
From the URI of the abstract legal resource, the URIs of the legal resources it encompasses are generated, as well as those of their expressions and formats.
Example: Ley 40/2015, de 1 de octubre, de Régimen Jurídico del Sector Público
The technical specification has chosen the ELI-ontology metadata which at a minimum all Administrations must share, in order to describe state-level and regional-level legislation in their databases (minimum common metadata).
The list of minimum common metadata can be consulted in https://www.elidata.es/mdr/metadata/
The BOE Agency, applying the three pillars of ELI, offers the minimum common metadata in RDF: on the HTML pages of the legislation it is available in RDFa and on the XML pages in RDF/XML.
Regarding the metadata that defines the relationships between the regulations published in the BOE and those published in the regional gazettes, the metadata eli:is another_publication is available for the regulations of those Autonomous Communities that have implemented the identifier.
In addition, the AEBOE provides the metadata eli:is_about, which describes the subject or topic to which a legal resource refers. Consult the values that the eli:is_about metadata can take and their corresponding descriptions.
One of the main objectives of ELI is to facilitate the re-use of legal information, by means of the configuration of URIs and generation of metadata expressed in RDF for each piece of legislation, based on a standard shared by the different official journals and databases.
Nonetheless, the achievement of this objective is enhanced if, in addition, a full and up-to-date list of the legal resources that each legal-information provider identifies through ELI is offered. For that reason, the BOE Agency makes available to users a series of files that have been specifically designed to facilitate the re-use of legislative information based on the ELI standard (PDF).
These files contain the complete list of all the legal norms to which the State Agency BOE has applied the ELI, each identified by the URIs corresponding to the abstract legal resource.
These URIs point to the HTML pages that a reuser would need to navigate in order to fully download the set of ELI metadata available on the AEBOE website.
It should be noted that the ELI metadata of each norm includes the URIs of its various versions, expressions, and formats, allowing the reuser to download either the initial or consolidated text of the norm from the corresponding URLs and in the preferred format among those available.
https://boe.es/eli/sitemap.xml
This page shows the index of sitemap files available at any given time.
Monthly.
It is complemented by an ATOM file which contains the updates (last 60 days).
In accordance with the Sitemap protocol.
Each entry consists of the following elements:
Contains the list of new legal resources and those that have undergone some kind of update, either by changes in their ELI metadata or by generation of a new consolidated version.
The resources are identified by the URI of the abstract legal resource.
Daily.
In addition, it contains a history of updates of the last 60 days.
In accordance with the Atom protocol.
Each entry in the feed includes the following XML elements:
State Agency Official State Gazette
Avda. de Manoteras, 54 - 28050 Madrid
