The Surveying Authority will release open data, the government approved it

Prague - The Land Surveying Office will provide database data or state maps for free as open data. Limited access to them will only be due to the protection of critical infrastructure according to the crisis law. This change is introduced by an amendment to the land surveying law, which was approved by the government today. This information is available on the government's website. The amendment also proposes that the results of surveying activities carried out by cadastral offices will not be verified by private surveying engineers, but by the cadastral offices themselves. The norm still needs to be discussed by Parliament and signed by the president.

The amendment is almost identical to the one discussed and approved by the cabinet of Prime Minister Andrej Babiš (ANO) in September 2020. The draft law was submitted to the Chamber of Deputies, which, however, did not manage to discuss it in the previous electoral period. According to the existing text with the proposed changes and additions, which is publicly available, the amendment only differs in the definition of the information system of the digital map of public administration.

The government of Petr Fiala (ODS) refers in the amendment to the establishment from the building law of the former government. According to the changes introduced by this paragraph, the owner of technical infrastructure can no longer require the applicant to cover the costs associated with providing data. As open data, the data will be provided free of charge.

According to the data in the explanatory memorandum, the Land Surveying Office is expected to lose approximately five million crowns annually. This is to be compensated by the benefits that the state should gain, for example, from taxing the activities of private entities, where the use of geospatial information is positively reflected in their income. Costs will also be reduced by the fact that the office will not have to manage this data separately for other authorities.

According to the proposal, all public authorities will now have to provide geographic data to the office, and conversely, all these institutions will have free access to it. "The proposed solution is expected to remove barriers and create prerequisites for the further development of geographically oriented information systems of public administration," adds the explanatory memorandum.