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EUR-Lex Access to European Union law

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This document is an excerpt from the EUR-Lex website

Use quotation marks to search for an "exact phrase". Append an asterisk (*) to a search term to find variations of it (transp*, 32019R*). Use a question mark (?) instead of a single character in your search term to find variations of it (ca?e finds case, cane, care).
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Reuse EUR-Lex content

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You can re-use EUR-Lex data, free of charge, subject to copyright conditions.

There are different ways to search for content and retrieve it for reuse.

Webservice

If you are a registered user, you can search on EUR-Lex directly using webservices. The search options are similar to those in 'expert search'. They supply data in XML format. More on how to use webservice.

Bulk download of the Official Journal

The OJ L and C series​ are available via data.europa.eu​ , the official portal for European data. You can download a list of the Official Journals published per year and language in csv format (from 2004 onward), with a link to each Official Journal in XML Formex format from the portal.

Direct access to the database

To process data in a more sophisticated way, you can request:

  1. Notifications via database RSS feeds – to notify you of every single change. These feeds may return very large numbers of notifications (millions a day).
  2. Direct access to your selection of content and metadata in the database, via the REST interface.

If you are interested in direct access, please contact us. We will send you additional documentation. Note that, given its complexity, you will need to involve technical experts.

Data repository

The information displayed in EUR-Lex is retrieved from the common repository of metadata and content (Cellar). Cellar is based on semantic technologies, a framework of several standards.

The data in Cellar are not limited to the legal documents and information published in EUR-Lex, but they also include other EU publications (books, leaflets, etc.). Data stored in Cellar can be directly accessed via the SPARQL endpoint and the RESTful API.

Through the SPARQL endpoint you can query all the metadata available in Cellar, including the relationship between the various entities. With the RESTful API you can retrieve specific sets of metadata (often called notices) and download the document content files. Both of these choices are available in various formats (PDF, HTML, Formex, etc.).

You can find out more and access the latest user manual, which includes information on the Cellar and its Restful API, on the Cellar website​ . You can query the metadata in Cellar through the SPARQL endpoint​ .

Data model

The structure of the data in Cellar is defined in the Common Data Model (CDM), which is based on semantic technologies like RDF Schema and OWL. Current and past versions of the CDM are available on the EU Vocabularies website​ .

Together with the definition of the ontology, the EU Vocabularies website also contains definitions for controlled vocabularies, taxonomies and the thesauruses used by Cellar.

In particular, the EU Vocabularies website provides the various authority tables​ used in metadata values to refer to specific entities or concepts, such as corporate body, treaty, country or language.

Document formats

The documents available in Cellar and in EUR-Lex are provided in various standard formats, depending on their availability: PDF, HTML, XHTML, etc.

A significant portion of the documents, in particular, those published in the Official Journal, are also available in a specific XML format called Formex. More information about this format is available on the Formex website​ .

Useful link

Legal Analysis Methodology (LAM)​

This presents the Publications Office’s know-how in the field of cataloguing EU legal acts published in the Official Journal and EUR-Lex. It describes the meaning and use of metadata elements attributed to those acts.