Availability of Historical Cadastral Data

A systematic approach to the establishment of the Franciscan Cadastre, which has been performed in most Central European countries, has resulted in the following documents: cadastral maps, cadastral municipality boundary demarcation records, lists of land parcels, lists of building parcels and lists of possessors. The documentation, which is stored in various archives, is digitized and made available to users through catalogs. The availability of documentation was examined in this study using three services in the catalogs—discovery, view and download—of which the largest percentage of documents is available through the discovery service. Documents that are available through the discovery service are described by the metadata standards. In this study, we examined the applicability of geographic information metadata standards and metadata standards to archival documentation in catalogs in which cadastral documentation was found. We determined a lack of application of geoinformation metadata standards, as it was a cadastral dataset, which represented one of the fundamental spatial datasets. The semantic mapping of elements between the applied standards in the catalogs and the geoinformation metadata standard (ISO 19115) showed that it was possible to apply the ISO 19115 standard to documents resulting from the establishment of the cadastre.