Worksheet Indicators 

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... Rules (see Figure 1). The 8 indicators do not monitor the organizational aspects of the INSPIRE implementation (e.g. the establishment of a coordinating structure), nor do they assess whether a country reaches the goal of improved sharing. Those aspects are not monitored but rather reported upon in a separate three year report with qualitative infor- mation on several non-technological and technologi- cal topics (such as coordination, functioning, usage, data sharing arrangements, and costs benefits). In this way, reporting is seen as a more general task requiring a more qualitative approach. With the accession of the Republic of Croatia to the EU, these implemen- ting rules are binding for the Republic of Croatia as of 1 July 2013. This means that an annual quantita- tive monitoring report had to be submitted before 15 May 2014. The deadline for submitting the three year NSDI/INSPIRE qualitative report is 15 May 2016. However, a three year qualitative report has already been prepared describing the status of the implemen- tation of INSPIRE and the NSDI of 2013 (see Sections 2.2 and 2.3). The accession of the Republic of Croatia to the EU and the National Spatial Data Infrastructure Act [3, 4], which transposes the INSPIRE Directive into the Croatian legislation, entails the obligation to monitor and report the NSDI development. Pursuant to the NSDI Act, a NSDI is a set of technologies, measures, standards, implementation rules, services, human resources and other factors enabling efficient inte- gration, management and maintenance of the sharing of spatial data as defined by this Act for the purpose of satisfying needs on both the national and Euro- pean levels, which will be an integral part of the Euro- pean SDI defined by the INSPIRE Directive. This Act briefly refers to the reporting towards the national bodies, the Croatian Government and the European Commission (EC). The NSDI Act also defines the State Geodetic Administration (SGA) as the National Contact Point and, as such, responsible for the monitoring and reporting. The reporting, especially towards the EC, is an important activity to serve as the basis for monitoring the NSDI development and the EU INSPIRE roadmap implementation at the national level [5]. The establishment and application of a Croatian NSDI reporting approach took place between April and July 2014 in the context of the Integrated Land Admi- nistration System (ILAS) Project, which is a project of the Government of the Republic of Croatia ratified by the Law on Loan Agreement between the Republic of Croatia and International Bank for Reconstruction and Development for ILAS Project (OG MU 13/2011) in order to modernize the land administration system for improving the state administration services in terms of efficiency, transparency and cost [6]. The ILAS-project is managed by the Croatian Ministry of Justice and the SGA and both institutions are equally responsible for its implementation. The implementation status of INSPIRE and the NSDI have been monitored and reported before, but never in a systematic and comprehensive way. From 2001 onwards, several ad hoc and international funded consultancy studies focused on the descrip- tion of the status of the NSDI development in Croatia [5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13]. In 2011, for the first time, Croatia took part in the State of Play reports cove- ring the NSDI development in 2010 and 2011 [14]. The EU-funded “INSPIRATION – Spatial Data Infra- structure in the Western Balkans” project (duration 2012 – 2013) provided relevant information about policy, institutional and legal NSDI frameworks with the purpose to promote SDIs and further coordinate the implementation in the region (including Croatia) [15]. The proceedings of the five NSDI and INSPIRE workshops (2012-2013) as well as the Croatian NSDI and INSPIRE Days (2009-2013) include also interesting material [5, 16]. From all these studies, it appeared that Croatia has good pre-conditions to successfully implement NSDI and INSPIRE, and that some building blocks are in place. The remaining part of the paper introduces briefly the approach applied for the monitoring and reporting followed by a short presentation of the main highli- ghts of the annual quantitative INSPIRE monitoring of 2014 and three year qualitative NSDI/INSPIRE repor- ting 2013. At the end, some key recommendations are provided for further INSPIRE/NSDI monitoring and reporting. The approaches applied for the Annual quantitative INSPIRE Monitoring 2014 and the Three year quali- tative NSDI/INSPIRE Reporting 2013 are briefly intro- duced Starting-point of the annual INSPIRE monitoring is the completion of a standardised form using a template provided by the Commission as part of the guidelines accompanying the Implementing Rules for Monitoring and Reporting [17]. The MS Excel template consists of 3 worksheets: Indicators, Contributor, and Data Input. The worksheet Indicators is only providing the resulting indicators. Figure 2 presents the Worksheet Indicators with relevant indicator values. The worksheet Contributor refers to basic infor- mation for the monitoring (Year, Member state, Name of organisation, E-mail address, and Language used). The worksheet Data Input refers to the input of data of all the reported spatial datasets and services necessary for calculating the values of the 8 indicators. An online questionnaire was designed by the Nati- onal Contact Point and made accessible to all repre- sentatives of the relevant public authorities (NSDI- Subjects pursuant to the NSDI Act). The resulting answers were stored in a Google spreadsheet. Figure 3 presents the online questionnaire made accessible to all the relevant public authorities to report their spatial datasets and services. The online questionnaire aimed to capture the information listed in the INSPIRE monitoring form necessary for feeding the calculation of 8 monitoring indicators. The answers to the questions of the online questi- onnaire were processed and checked on errors. The answers were manually transferred to the annual INSPIRE monitoring form. The final version of the INSPIRE monitoring form was submitted to the European Commission on 15 May 2014. The resulting report of the three year qualitative reporting needs to address the following 5 topics: 1) Organisation, coordination and quality assurance; 2) Contribution to the functioning and coordination of the infrastructure; 3) Usage of the infrastructure for spatial information; 4) Data sharing arrangements; and 5) Cost and benefit aspects. A template has been made available by the Euro- pean Commission as part of the Guidelines on Monito- ring and Reporting, providing a structure that Member States can use to collect and transmit the reporting to the EC [20]. The qualitative reporting was mainly based on a review of numerous relevant documents [4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 16]. In addition, discussions with key stakeholders of the INSPIRE implementation and experts with knowledge about the Croatian NSDI formed another source for the qualitative NSDI/ INSPIRE reporting. Moreover, a workshop on INSPIRE Monitoring and Reporting was organized with 22 NSDI- stakeholders (Zagreb, 13 June 2014). During this event, several questions were discussed in breakout groups. The questions mainly addressed those topics for which information was missing or for which not much infor- mation was available (e.g. Quality assurance procedu- res; Quantitative usage of existing metadata data and services; Data sharing arrangements between public authorities and European Community institutions and bodies; and Cost/Benefit aspects related to the INSPIRE implementation). In this way, the quality of the report was improved and allowed the stakeholders to contribute to the reporting process. Finally, the staff members of the NCP critically reviewed several versions of the report. The main results of the annual monitoring 2014 are that 152 spatial datasets from 18 different public authorities (NSDI-Subjects) were reported of which 45 spatial datasets referred to themes of INSPIRE Annex 1, 34 to Annex 2, and 73 to Annex 3. Of the 24 services reported, 1 service s is a discovery service, 14 services are viewing services, and 9 services are download services. 77% of the reported spatial datasets and services have metadata (58% for the datasets referring to themes of Annex 1; 85% for Annex 2; 81% for Annex 3; 88% for the services). 69% of those metadata are conformant (56% for Annex 1; 76% for Annex 2; 68% for Annex 3; 88% for the services). The extent of the spatial datasets is 93% (99% for the Annex 1 datasets; 84% for Annex 2; and 93% for Annex 3). Regarding the services, 43% of the reported spatial datasets is discoverable, 8% viewable and downloadable at the same time. It appeared that some INSPIRE themes were not yet covered (e.g. III.8 – Production and Industrial Faci- lities, III,17 Bio-geographical regions), some of the reported datasets through the online survey were in reality not spatial datasets (e.g. rather maps in pdf-format). It seemed also that the meaning of the concept of ‘relevant area’ for a spatial dataset was not always clear. Moreover, it appeared that it was not always clear what to monitor. As a rule of thumb, it is recommended to monitor all spatial datasets that somehow fall under one of the 34 themes (being data- sets, data products or data series). The INSPIRE Monitoring 2014 can be considered as the first official overview of the status of INSPIRE spatial data and services and as such can be treated as a reference for future management of spatial data and services in the Republic of Croatia. The main outcome of the three year qualitative report [20] is that the implementation of INSPIRE and NSDI is on track in the Republic of Croatia. However, several implementation issues need extra future attention, such as issues related to quality assurance, usage, benefits and funding. The NSDI Act [3] ...