Mapping Akoma Ntoso and ELI to schema.org

19 July 2026

Three vocabularies describe a law, and they are not rivals.

• Akoma Ntoso is the document: an XML grammar for the text, its structure (eIds, articles, paragraphs), and its FRBR identity (work / expression / manifestation).
• ELI — the European Legislation Identifier — is the linked-data identity: stable URIs plus an RDF ontology for the properties (eli:date_document, eli:jurisdiction, eli:version, …).
• schema.org is the web-native surface: the Legislation type (co-designed with the EU Publications Office to align with ELI) that search engines and generic tools already understand.

The nice part is that JSON-LD lets all three sit in one graph. A single @context can pull in schema.org and bind eli: to the ELI ontology, so one node can be a schema.org Legislation, carry eli: properties, and reference the Akoma Ntoso FRBR IRI as its legislationIdentifier:

{
  "@context": ["https://schema.org", { "eli": "http://data.europa.eu/eli/ontology#" }],
  "@type": "Legislation",
  "name": "Bundesverfassung, Art. 47",
  "legislationIdentifier": "/akn/ch/cons/1999-04-18/101",
  "sameAs": "https://fedlex.data.admin.ch/eli/cc/1999/404",
  "eli:jurisdiction": "CH",
  "legislationDate": "1999-04-18"
}

This is the first in a short series working through the full mapping — property by property — between AKN-CH, ELI-CH and schema.org. It’s also the reason this very site models Legislation and Periodical/PublicationVolume/PublicationIssue from day one.

• Akoma Ntoso
• ELI
• schema.org
• JSON-LD