The baltic regions biggest geospatial service providers- Latvian company SIA "Map publishers Jāņa sēta" and Estonia's “Reach-U” Ltd are working on a project called “Baltic Geodata Marketplace”, to provide an international Baltic geospatial service platform. The project is being implemented by Estonia's and Latvia's (EST-LAT) cross-border project with the goal of "Increasing the competitiveness of SME's" priortizing in "An Active and Attractive Business Environment". The combined project's costs are EUR 765,584, and EUR 493,198.57 and are covered by Europe's Regional Development fund for Latvia and Estonia cross border colaboration program Interreg V-A. The planned lenght of the contract is 30 months.
The goal of the project is to develop and secure further information technology systems for developers and buisnesses on a single geospatial data server. On this server they hope to combine existing databases and acess tools from the worked data servers, that contain similar geosptaial data from various baltic countires. During the project, two of Latvia's and Estonias biggest cartographic and geospatial data providers in the private sector, will join together to show new solutions and methods to join the region together, providing constantly updated and precise geospatial data to the public and private sectors.
"Our company provides precise geospatial data stores for all of Latvia's territory, exactly the same thing our partners "Reach-U" in Estonia do for the territories in their own country. Successful merger of these resources and creation of a combined platform could further be expanded to all of the Baltic states regions, creating a product that would fully support our end goal for developers, greatly increase the industry's income and investment, whose operations are based on the use of geospatial data and information. A prime example being foreign companies trying to increase their production and expand influence in the region. The baltic ststes are considered as one market, but to organize, say delivery services, one must buy adresses and routing data separately from each country, and delivery service. Of course, that adds to costs, increases delivery time and problems with varying data collection, analysys and storage.
Map maker's "Jana Seta" is the baltics biggest cartography company, which provides physical maps, along with geographic information system (GIS), base maps and development and maintenence of information technology products and services.
For over 20 years now, Estonian company "Reach-U" has been characterized by their abiliy to develop personalized solutions, that focus on GIS, cartographic and spatial analysis. The company provides solution development, beggining with precise data, excelent programming and software for their maps and data storage, and exports data to over 30 countries world wide.
The Estonian-Latvian cross-border cooperation is being implemented by the European Union's stuctural and investment fund "European territory cooperation" (Interreg) within the European Region's support fund, to stregnthen ties between Estonia and Latvia's border regions. The programs home page is: www.estlat.eu