AKN4EU - Akoma Ntoso for the European Union
What is AKN4EU?
AKN4EU is the European Union’s application profile of the Akoma Ntoso standard for legislative documents. It defines a machine-readable XML vocabulary for EU legal acts so citations, structures, and identifiers can travel cleanly across systems.
LexPons uses AKN4EU as its canonical format - the stable, source-linked representation from which all other outputs are derived.
Why AKN4EU in LexPons?
- It is aligned with the Publications Office’s approach to EU legal publishing.
- It provides fine-grained element identification for articles, paragraphs, lists, and references.
- It supports provenance, versioning, and downstream transformations without losing source traceability.
- JSON output derived from AKN4EU is the anchor for the Veroberg hash chain.