geographic information throughout the country. It specifies the metadata elements needed to increase the lifetime and value of spatial data and services. These elements include identification information; use restrictions; spatial and temporal extent; geographic resource maintenance information; spatial representation and reference; quality; and the distribution of geographic resources, such as access policies. The Geoportal extension provides data publishers with an online metadata editor that makes it easy for them to publish metadata about geographic resources in conformance with the Austrian Metadata Profile. The Geoportal extension was chosen because it provides the technological keys for sharing and reusing resources across applications, enterprises, and community boundaries and facilitates development of a metadata editor that conforms to a specific metadata profile. The Geoportal extension also includes a metadata editor tool, discovery tools, a data visualization application, and metadata harvesting tool that enable automated acquisition of metadata from other repositories. Bridging Data Producers and Users The geoportal represents the bridge between data producers and users. The producers create data and services for their own business needs and publish corresponding metadata to the geoportal. Users returned G I S AT T H E C O Rformulate queries and evaluate the 31 E OF SDIs metadata records to decide whether the discovered data accomplishes their requirements. The geoportal’s metadata editor makes geographic resources discoverable in a straightforward manner. The publisher logs in to the geoportal and chooses either the spatial datasets or spatial services schema that conforms to the specifications of the Austrian Metadata Profile. Then, using the metadata editor, the user fills in information about the data or services to create its metadata. If the user needs assistance, hints provide more information about what values should be input in each field. The generated metadata is then added to a metadata repository that is comparable to a library catalog. Users can search and find information about the availability of a particular dataset or service, which includes information about content, author, year of publication, and more. The available geoportal and the online customized metadata editor represent an important step toward shaping a national spatial data infrastructure and a milestone toward achieving the goals of the INSPIRE Directive. About the Author Mariana Belgiu is research assistant at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Institute for Geographic Information Science, Salzburg, Austria. She received her M.Sc. degree in GIS at the University of Salzburg, Austria (2009), and she is now in the initial stages of her Ph.D. work with a focus on ontologies within the spatial data infrastructure framework. More Information For more information, contact Mariana Belgiu (e-mail: mariana.belgiu@oeaw.ac.at) or Prof. Dr. Josef Strobl, director, Institute for Geographic Information Science, Austrian Academy of Sciences (e-mail: josef.strobl@ oeaw.ac.at), or visit the Web site (www.oeawgiscience.org). services lack comprehensible documentation. This can be solved by accompanying the spatial data with metadata, which is structured information that describes the datasets. Unfortunately, many data producers do not understand the benefits of creating metadata and treat the task as boring, time consuming, and therefore unnecessary. To address this problem, Austria prepared a national metadata profile combining specifications of international standards, INSPIRE’s Metadata Implementing Rule, and existing regulations in the country. This profile, the Austrian Metadata Profile, ensures a consistent approach to Geoportal search for biomass potential.