EUR-Lex Access to European Union law
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Ministry of Justice, Finland
Aki Hietanen
https://data.finlex.fi
Pillars 1, 2 and 3
Finland legislation is published using the URI template described at https://data.finlex.fi/fi/urit
The metadata model is explained at https://data.finlex.fi/fi/lainsaadanto
https://data.finlex.fi/eli/sd/2008/521/alkup.html
The implementation of ELI was started in 2015 in close cooperation with the ELI project of the EU Publications Office (especially Thomas Francart. The website Semantic Finlex, implementing ELI, was opened in March 2016. Semantic Finlex contains the datasets of Consolidated legislation and Original texts of acts and decrees in RDF format. Original texts of acts and decrees contains legal texts as originally published in the Statutes of Finland. Consolidated legislation contains updated versions of the original texts of acts and decrees. A statute's text is updated whenever an amendment to it is published in the Statutes of Finland.
RDF data model
The RDF data model applied to legal datasets is based on the ELI standard (European Legislation Identifier) designed, in order to enhance interoperability between the legislation of the EU and its Member States. The ELI standard defines a metadata model (ontology) for statutes and a template for creating Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). In the Semantic Finlex project, the ELI ontology was expanded with the Semantic Finlex Legislation (SFL) ontology developed as part of the project.
ELI ontology
The ELI ontology is based on a general FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) description model. In FRBR terminology, 'work' refers to a written document at the conceptual level (as a separate written creation), 'expression' refers to a separate implementation of a work (for example, a certain language version) and 'manifestation' refers to the physical manifestation of an expression (a certain publication, such as a PDF). ELI applies the FRBR model by creating its own counterparts for legal datasets as follows:
As part of the ELI ontology, metadata fields are defined for each level. These will be presented below.
SFL ontology
SFL ontology (Semantic Finlex Legislation) is an extension to ELI ontology used in the Semantic Finlex service. In addition to different language and content format versions SFL defines classes for different temporal versions of statutes and sections of law. Therefore, SFL divides eli:LegalResource class to four subclasses as follows:
The relationship between a statute and a statute version is expressed with properties eli:has_member and eli:is_member_of. The relationship between a section of a law and a section of a law version is expressed likewise with the same properties.
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Last update: 01/12/2022