This project aims at proposing an extension to the schema.org vocabulary to describe legislation documents, along with use-cases and markup examples.

Schema.org is a vocabulary endorsed by major web search engines to encode structured information in web pages. It covers a variety of object types commonly described on the web, but lacks types and properties to describe legislation. This extension will enable websites that publish and describe legislation to add structured markup to make the legislation metadata reusable by others - and especially search engines.

ELI (European Legislation Identifier) is an initiative of some national legislation publishers endorsed by EU countries and Institutions, to identify, describe and link legislation on the web. It relies on semantic web technologies, and uses an ontology to encode legislation metadata, embedded in portal web pages using RDFa markup. The extension will be based on the ELI ontology, already endorsed by some national legislation publishers, to propose a metadata model to describe legislations within the schema.org framework. For more information on ELI, see the ELI register, Wikipedia, and eli.fr.

This extension will allow webmasters of legal-oriented websites and portals to disseminate and link legislation metadata on the web. It will also be a good starting point for public administrations responsible for publishing legislation to create their own metadata model.

To start reading and using the extension, the readers should be aware of the schema.org vocabulary, and metadata serialisation techniques such as RDFa or JSON-LD. To use the proposed extension, additional markup should be included in the web pages that publishes legislation items.