Back in March 2017, one of the largest geospatial service providers in the Baltics –Latvian Karšu izdevniecība Jāņa sēta and Estonian Reach-U launched a cross-border project Baltic Geodata Marketplace to create a joint geospatial service platform in the Baltics.
The project aims to develop and provide an information technology solution for developers and entrepreneurs, resulting in a single platform which entails the use and subscription of geospatial data services by combining existing databases and convenient access to portal from their derived geospatial data services. Thus, offering the most up-to-date high accuracy geospatial data and its services for both the private and public sectors.
Both companies have the most accurate and up-to-date set of geospatial data for the territory of Latvia and Estonia. Combining these resources and creating a single platform, extension of their framework for the whole Baltic region will produce a product that will be an essential support for the developers and will provide an indispensable investment for companies whose operational decisions are based on the use of geospatial information. Currently foreign investors and companies trying to expand their activities in the Baltics, are constrained with two options: to choose a global data/service provider with less accurate data or to purchase address and routing data separately for each country from multiple service providers. In this case, current options are costly and time-consuming as the different datasets are often incompatible.
The project is currently in the development and testing stage. The main common services created are a single base map (WMS, WMTS), address geocoding and reverse geocoding services, address component (Gazetteer) service, routing, and interest object (POI) search service. Additional services will be route optimization, search for road numbers and profile geometry, and search for geometry of administrative and territorial units.
The development and testing stages allow for an online portal prototype designed to provide customers (third-party developers) with a chance to test the service: for example, to get an access to them, to pay, and to follow the usage statistics.
An essential project goal is to ensure the usability and subscription transparency of created services by providing metadata, easy and transparent pricing policies.
The project is implemented in the Estonia–Latvia (EST-LAT) thematic objective of the cross-border cooperation programme “Promoting the competitiveness of SMEs” in the priority axis “Active and attractive business environment”. The total amount of eligible costs for the project account for EUR 765 584.45, of which EUR 493198.57 shall be covered by the Estonia–Latvia cross border cooperation programme. The intended duration of the project is 30 months.