Redefining of “EPSG” and “PROJ” for current State Coordinate Reference System of the Republic of North Macedonia

Abstract. The state Coordinate Reference System (CRS) of the Republic of North Macedonia (RNM) has been established a century ago, by the Military Geographic Institute of the Yugoslavia Kingdom. It is in official usage entire period up to day. In international public EPSG registry of geodetic datums, spatial reference systems, Earth ellipsoids, coordinate transformations and related units of measurement, CRS for RNM is recognizable within 3 EPSG codes 6204, 6316 and 8679.

First code EPSG 6204 represents current state CRS for the entire country area, based on current law, however unfortunately this CRS is official by the law but it is not used for developing the official spatial data published in geoportals of Agency for Real Estate Cadastre (AREC) and NSDI geoportal of RNM. The second code EPSG 6316 is defined to be used for 6 countries of former Yugoslavia that covers area between 19.5°E up to 22.5°E longitude, which does not correspond with the practical and official usage of CRS for working with spatial data in RNM and CRS law definition in RNM. Third code EPSG 8679 has never been used in RNM, which covers eastern part of RNM and Serbia beginning from 22.5°E.

Beside of problems with EPSG codes, default transformation parameters of EPSG 6316 have low accuracy and can not be used for data overlapping with open layers. Therefore, redefined new EPSG codes for state CRS of RNM are proposed in this paper.