About LEOS

LEOS is a software that was created under ISA2 Action 2016.38 Legislation Interoperability Tools - LegIT to address the need of the public administration and European Institutions to generate draft legislation in a legal XML format.

It is a legislation editor and this current release 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. If you want to find out more about this procedure, please read the European Parliament's article.

Given the high diversity of legislative traditions encountered across the Union and the different levels of modernisation, it was extremely difficult to provide a universal single turnkey ICT solution that adapts to each specific context. Even if a significant part of the business logic can be found embedded in the code, we design with the goal of delivering re-usable building blocks so LEOS 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. For more information on the features please check out our article here.

The code is available for free under European Union Public Licence 1.2 licence, and the development team paid attention to organise the code in a structured way to ease its reusability (modules, plugins…).  

For more information on the EUPL licence, please visit this link. 

What’s new?

The main differences compared to the previous prototype version are:

• Documentation
  • Updated HOWTO documentation. 
  • LEOS 3.0 Manual.
• Repository viewer:
  • New filters by template and by role in proposal.
  • Proposal can be opened by selecting proposal card.
• Proposal Viewer:
  • New Milestone explorer:
    • Display all documents contained in a Milestone with version information;
    • Show annotations up to the selected milestone version for each document.
• Explanatory Memorandum Viewer
  • New versions management.
  • New comparison view in split mode replacing pre-existing pop-up window.
• Legal Text Viewer
  • New Inline Table of content edition, replacing pre-existing pop-up window.
  • New versions management.
  • New comparison view in split mode replacing pre-existing pop-up window.
  • Improved Internal references:
    • Display all referenceable documents in internal references pop-up window;
    • New Inter-document referencing feature;
• Annex Viewer
  • New Inline Table of content edition, replacing pre-existing pop-up.
  • New versions management.
  • New comparison view in split mode replacing pre-existing pop-up window.
  • New structured annexes:
    • Level annexes: Annexes composed by AKN4EU Level elements;
    • Article annexes: Annexes composed by Article elements;
• Annotations
  • Improved user interface and usability.
  • New filters with possibility to use composed conditions.
  • New guidelines functionality connecting document anchors (highlights) to the specific annotation it relates to.
  • Allow multi-selection of annotations.
  • Annotation: Overlapping document anchors with distinct layout colors.
  • Support role now able to see all available groups for posting.
  • Removal of the annotations from the milestones. Comments should not leave Leos

• LEOS configuration:
  • Templates configuration improvements. Support for your own AKN format.
  • Configure auto numbering.
  • AKN elements and rules.
  • Ckeditor behavior with AKN elements.
  • Posibility to create proposals without explanatory memorandum.
• LEOS services - New services for the integration with other systems.
• Technical improvements:
  • SAML authentication Integration.
  • New PDF export architecture, implementation to be included in future release. (contribution from Ministry of the Presidency, Relations with the Parliament and Democratic Memory, Spain).
• Bug fixes
• Updated dependencies (frameworks and libraries) CKEDITOR upgrade to 4.12.1, Vaadin upgrade to 8.8.6.

What’s gone?

• Nothing this time.

Demo

Have a look at the LEOS 3.0.0 demo as shown during our webinar on 25. May:

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank our collaborators from the Ministry of the Presidency, Relations with the Parliament and Democratic Memory, Spain and the Council of the European Union. 

We welcome further contributions. So have your say! We count on your feedback.

Get in touch

We are working on the creation of 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 join the conversation one legislative drafting here https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/news/efficient-legislative-drafting OR contact us at DIGIT-LEOS-FEEDBACK@ec.europa.eu .

We are looking forward to hearing from you,

The LEOS Team for LegIT ISA2 Action