The Law on State Survey and Real Estate Cadastre (NN 16/07, 124/19), hereinafter: Law, defines metadata as information which describes spatial data sets and services and enables their discovery, preview and use. Metadata are key elements for establishment of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI). Unfortunately, few subjects of Croatian NSDI nowadays have metadata of their data. Another problem is that the existing metadata is not standardized and harmonized with European norms and regulations related to metadata. The Law further states the subjects of the NSDI are obliged to regularly maintain their metadata, and make it available at the request of the State Geodetic Administration (SGA) so that the SGA can establish and maintain public metadata service on the Internet (through geoportals). The major task of establishing a metadata catalogue lies ahead of the SGA, as well as all NSDI subjects. In order to establish the metadata catalogue, it is first necessary to adopt necessary specifications and create a national metadata profile.

In August 2010, the Croatian Government adopted The Implementing Rules for Metadata (OG 102/10) which are fully compliant with the INSPIRE Implementing Rules for metadata. The next step was to develop a national metadata profile. SGA drafted the Croatian national metadata profile in 2011 with the expert support of the Working Group on technical standards for the NSDI and consultants from the German company Conterra. The profile should satisfy the needs of all stakeholders of the NSDI and should be based on existing specifications and standards, i.e. implementing rules for metadata, HRN EN ISO 19115 metadata, HRN EN ISO 19119 Services and all other relevant ISO standards and be compliant with the INSPIRE Implementing Rules for metadata. The national profile of metadata must be simple and interoperable in reference to INSPIRE and also such that individual subjects of the NSDI, in accordance with their needs, can extend and define themselves the metadata profile for their specific data sets.

The aim of the presentation is to inform subjects of NSDI of the proposal of the national metadata profile in order to obtain feedback and create a national profile to the satisfaction of all parties of the Croatian NSDI.