Publications Office of the European Union Caveat : this section gives the current state of thinking about the ELI identifiers at the Publications Office of the European Union, and should not be considered definitive. Anything described here may evolve in the future. General structure of the identifiers The Publications Office will use URIs to refer to 4 different levels of abstraction of a legal resource (from most generic to most specific): Abstract Anact, independently of one of its temporal version (e.g. without Resource specifying if we refer to the original version as published in the OJ or to one of the consolidated version), independently of its language, and independently of the file format. Such URIs are said to be identifiers, and can be used to “abstract” make a reference to an act without specifying explicitly to which version. In other words, the abstract legal resource all “contains” the versionsof the same piece of legislation. Legal Resource A legal resource can represent a specific temporal version of an act, that is either : The original version as published in the OJ; The consolidated versions of the legal resource that were in force atparticular points in time; Corrigenda and modifiers amending the act are also legal resources, although they are not considered to be part of the legal resource” of the act they are correcting or “abstract modifying. Corrigenda and modifiers are rather linked to the specific resource they are correcting or modifying with a link of type “changes/changedBy”. A specific linguistic version of a legal resource (an original Expression version, a consolidated version, a corrigenda or a modifier) Format A specific file format of one of the specific linguistic version of a resource. The descriptions of the identifiers for these 4 levels of abstraction are given in the sections below. Identifying abstract resources (Directives and Regulations in a first stage)
Publications Office of the European Union Caveat : this section gives the current state of thinking about the ELI identifiers at the Publications Office of the European Union, and should not be considered definitive. Anything described here may evolve in the future. General structure of the identifiers The Publications Office will use URIs to refer to 4 different levels of abstraction of a legal resource (from most generic to most specific): Abstract Resource Anact, independently of one of its temporal version (e.g. without specifying if we refer to the original version as published in the OJ or to one of the consolidated version), independently of its language, and independently of the file format. Such URIs are said to be “abstract” identifiers, and can be used to make a reference to an act without specifying explicitly to which version. In other words, the abstract legal resource “contains” all the versionsof the same piece of legislation. Legal Resource A legal resource can represent a specific temporal version of an act, that is either : The original version as published in the OJ; The consolidated versions of the legal resource that were in force atparticular points in time; Corrigenda and modifiers amending the act are also legal resources, although they are not considered to be part of the “abstract legal resource” of the act they are correcting or modifying. Corrigenda and modifiers are rather linked to the specific resource they are correcting or modifying with a link of type “changes/changedBy”. Expression A specific linguistic version of a legal resource (an original version, a consolidated version, a corrigenda or a modifier) Format A specific file format of one of the specific linguistic version of a resource. The descriptions of the identifiers for these 4 levels of abstraction are given in the sections below. Identifying abstract resources (Directives and Regulations in a first stage)