Glossary
The terms of Open·Parlamento, in plain language: the identifiers of statutes, the open formats, the tools for AI and the vocabulary of the Italian legislative process.
ELI (European Legislation Identifier)
A stable, citable identifier of a statute (or one of its articles) in the European and national legal order. It lets you point uniquely and persistently to a law, e.g. eli:/it/legge/2024/03/02/19.
CELEX
The unique identifier of European Union acts (regulations, directives, decisions and judgments) in the EUR-Lex database. Sector 6 gathers the case law of the EU Court of Justice.
Akoma Ntoso
An XML standard (OASIS) for representing legal and parliamentary documents in a structured, machine-readable way: articles, paragraphs, amendments and metadata. It is the format in which Normattiva publishes consolidated statutes.
Normattiva
The official database of consolidated Italian legislation. It publishes texts in Akoma Ntoso with ELI identifiers and the amendment relations between statutes (what amends/repeals/replaces what), under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
Iter legislativo (legislative process)
The path by which a bill or a legislative proposal becomes law: introduction, examination in committee, approval by the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, promulgation and publication in the Gazzetta Ufficiale.
Decreto-legge (decree-law, D.L.)
An act with the force of law adopted by the Italian Government in cases of necessity and urgency; it lapses if not converted into law by Parliament within 60 days (art. 77 of the Italian Constitution).
Decreto legislativo (legislative decree, D.lgs)
An act with the force of law issued by the Italian Government under a delegation from Parliament (enabling law), within the principles and time limits set by the delegation (art. 76 of the Italian Constitution).
MCP server (Model Context Protocol)
A program that exposes tools (functions) callable by an AI assistant through the Model Context Protocol, the open standard introduced to connect models with external sources/data. Open·Parlamento publishes two open-source MCP servers: republic-mcp and open-parlamento-mcp.
Knowledge graph
A representation of data as a network of entities (statutes, articles, acts) linked by typed relations (amends, repeals, refers to). It lets you navigate the law as a graph instead of as isolated text.
GraphRAG / LightRAG
A Retrieval-Augmented Generation technique that combines semantic search and a knowledge graph to give answers anchored to sources. LightRAG is the GraphRAG engine (MIT) used by Open·Parlamento for the per-article text.
SPARQL
A query language for data in RDF format (Linked Open Data). The Chamber of Deputies and the Senate expose their data (acts, parliamentary process, votes) via SPARQL endpoints.
CKAN
An open-source platform for open-data portals. A single API (/api/3/action/…) reaches hundreds of portals: dati.gov.it, data.europa.eu and many regional catalogues.
Legislative OSINT
Open-source intelligence applied to legislation: analysis based exclusively on public, open and citable sources (statutes, parliamentary process, parliamentary data), with stable identifiers that make verification possible.
Learn more: what an MCP server is · citing a statute with the ELI · Open·Parlamento’s MCP servers.