At SEMIC 2014 Mr John Dann, the Chair of ELI Task Force will present the European Legislation Identifier; a step has been made towards legal semantic interoperability in Europe. ELI paves the way for a semantic web of official journals and offers a cost-effective public access to reliable up-to-date legislation.

Legal information is today widely available and accessible in electronic form. However, the way in which information is organised and classified varies in the different legal systems, a fact that tends to restrict access and reuse possibilities.

In response to this challenge in 2012 the Council adopted the conclusions of the Working Party on e-Law, presided by the Luxembourg government, on the optional introduction of the so-called European Legislation Identifier (ELI). ELI provides, among others, a solution to uniquely identify and access national and European legislation online. It aims to guarantee easier access, exchange and reuse of legislation for public authorities, professional users, academics and citizens. By deploying this new unique identifier and structured metadata to reference legislation published in the official journals and legal gazettes of different legal systems, the semantic barrier expected to be overcome.  By principle the unique identifier is recognizable, readable and understandable by both humans and computers, and compatible with existing technological standards. In addition, ELI proposed also a set of metadata elements to describe legislation in compliance with a recommended ontology. The European Legislation Identifier (ELI) aims to guarantee a cost-effective public access to reliable up-to-date legislation. Benefiting from the emerging architecture of the semantic web, which enables information to be directly processed by computers and humans alike, ELI would allow a greater and faster exchange of data by enabling an automatic and efficient exchange of information.