The European legislation identifier (ELI) ‘Pillar 4 Helper’ is a tool that helps ELI publishers who are implementing the Pillar 4 specification according to the ELI standard. It is a solution by the Publications Office of the European Union.
This tool allows ELI publishers to:
- generate a Pillar4-conformant Atom feed from a sitemap file; this will read the most recent sitemap entries to insert them in the Atom feed.
- or generate both a sitemap and an Atom feed from a tabular CSV file; the CSV file contains the ELI URI, its update date, and optionally a title.
- or generate both a sitemap and an Atom feed from a SPARQL query executed against a SPARQL endpoint; the query must return the ELI URI, its update date, and optionally a title.
For an ELI provider to adhere to the ELI Pillar 4 protocol, they need to provide the ELI Sitemap and the ELI Atom feed.
The intended usage of the tool is through automatically scheduled tasks. It is a command-line Java application, requiring a Java Runtime Environment, version 8 or above.
ELI Pillar 4 enables the harvesting of data and metadata, by providing a complete list of legislation identifiers as well as notifications when a new legislation identifier is introduced. This makes it possible to provide persistent machine-readable and processable access to EU Law but also to support linking between legal acts in different legal systems and be the basis for value added services. More information can be found at (About ELI - EUR-Lex (europa.eu)).
The source code is available in an open-source repository: GitHub - sparna-git/eli-pillar4-helper: Helper application for ELI Pillar IV protocol.
