Building Danube Reference Data and Service Infrastructure for Danube Region Strategy

The Digital Earth and Reference Data Unit of the Institute for Environment and Sustainability (IES ) of the Joint Research Centre (JRC ) is developing a Danube Reference Data and Service Infrastructure (DRDSI ). Within this project, national experts from each country of Danube Region will participate in building their national DRDSI , in support to creating DRDSI for entire Danube Region. Priority is given to dana in support to the JRC agreed vertical priorities: Environmental protection, Irrigation and agriculture development, Navigability and Energy production. The emphasis is in harvesting metadata on available spatial and non-spatial data, rather then collecting spatial data. There are four main activities: characterizing the state of play of the national data infrastructures (NDI ), creating data inventory, assessment of the conditions and constraints related to ensuring access to data in the scope of EUSDR , and outreach activities. In Croatia, there is NSDI subjects register and NSDI data resources register as good starting point, however the aim of data inventory within this project is to identify available Danube reference data resources and responsible organizations which are not subjects of NSDI as well. Also, one of main tasks is to map certain data resources to four vertical priorities with respect to INSPIRE Annex themes as well. In this paper, methodology, activities and results of DRDSI project will be elaborated. A good state of play overview, large data inventory (data resources and responsible organizations) and good cooperation in this area while motivating other non-EU countries in Danube Region (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Ukraine, Moldova) to start building their NSDI is expected.