Collaborative Legal Text Editor - EC Publishes Source Code of LEOS Prototype

Von: Lisa Käde

On June 22nd 2015 the European Commission announced that the source code of a prototype of LEOS, an open source application for editing legal texts, was going to be made available soon. Now, the source code is available for download on on Joinup, the European Commission’s collaboration platform for ICT solutions. The most recent version was made available on July 27th.

The action “LEOS” was started in Q2/2011 and is supposed to be finished later this year. The tool is supposed to make the time-consuming process of drafting new legislation more efficient.

The name “LEOS” stands for Legislation Editing Open Software. The name allows to make conclusions about the type of software behind it – LEOS is licensed under the European Union Public License (EUPL), a copyleft license compatible with the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) v. 2, the Open Software License (OSL) v. 2.1, v. 3.0, the Common Public License v. 1.0, the Eclipse Public License v. 1.0 and Cecill v. 2.0.

The prototype of LEOS supports acts issued by the European Commission and stores contents as XML data. Joinup.ec.europa.eu lists the following features:

  • Acts can be created from a template
  • Higher divisions can be managed by  drag and drop (chapters, sections)
  • A WYSIWYG editor will be included to edit article contents (paragraphs, alineas, points...)
  • LEOS will allow for versioning (comparison of versions)
  • Collaboration - several users will be able to edit an act at the same time
  • Hhuman readable views (HTML, pdf) can be generated

We will stay on the tracks of this promising project and test-drive the tool in the meantime.