Published on: 15/11/2017
Last update: 10/02/2022
LEOS is a software created to address the need of the European Institutions to generate draft legislation in a legal XML format.
It is a legislation editor and it currently supports the drafting of the 'secondary' legislation of the EU law which has to be adopted under the Ordinary Legislative Procedure.
Therefore, it covers the writing of Proposals for Directive, Decision and Regulation submitted by the Commission to the Council and the Parliament.
This Beta version is currently used for a pilot across the Commission services. The main differences compared to the previous prototype version are:
- Acts are managed as a set of elements (explanatory memorandum, legal text, annexes…) and global metadata are propagated across sub-elements
- Improved version management, with major versions and possibility to see differences between versions
- Import feature, enabling to import some content already published in the Official Journal of the EU
- New security layer
- Support of images
Note that some features of the prototype were removed :
- The locking of the edited area and the notifications mechanism have not been retained because judged too cumbersome; it might come back under another form
- The pdf rendering is now delegated to a service external to the project
- Feedback view is removed as workflows are not part of system
A significant part of the business logic being into the code, LEOS is not intended to be a generic software supporting the drafting of any kind of national legislative tradition. Nevertheless, it is released Open Source as we believe that some parts of it could be reused and adapted by some other Public Administration having similar needs. The code is available for free under European Union Public Licence 1.2, and the development team paid attention to organise the code in a structured way to ease its reusability (modules, plugins…).
We are envisaging to create an open source community on software for legislation drafting, in order to share best practices, experiences, expertise, and why not code!!
Should you be interested or would you just like to share with us some observations on our work, you can contact us at DIGIT-LEOS-FEEDBACK@ec.europa.eu
The LEOS Team
