The Czech Land Survey Office, which manages state maps and database data, will provide this information free of charge as open data. Limited access to them will only be due to the protection of critical infrastructure under the emergency law. The change is introduced by an amendment to the Land Surveying Act, whose government proposal was supported by the House of Representatives today in the first round of discussion. It will be reviewed by the agricultural committee, which will have an extended three-month period for it.
According to the amendment, the results of land surveying activities carried out by the cadastral offices would no longer be verified by private surveying engineers, but by the cadastral offices themselves.
Newly, according to the proposal, all public authorities will have to provide geographic data to the office, and vice versa, all these institutions will have free access to them. “The proposed solution is expected to remove obstacles and create prerequisites for the further development of geographically oriented public administration information systems,” adds the explanatory memorandum.
The amendment is almost identical to the draft prepared in September 2020 by the cabinet of Andrej Babiš (ANO). But the Chamber did not have time to discuss this amendment in the last election period. The current amendment differs from the original version only in the definition of the digital public administration map information system.
In the amendment, the government of Petr Fiala (ODS) refers to the provisions of the Building Act, according to which the owner of the technical infrastructure can no longer demand payment of the costs associated with the provision of data from the applicant. As open data, the data will be provided free of charge.
According to the data in the explanatory report, the Land Surveyor Office is set to lose approximately five million crowns per year. This should compensate for the benefits that the state should have, for example, by taxing the activities of private individuals whose use of geospatial information will have a positive impact on their income. Costs will also be reduced by the fact that the office will not have to manage this data separately for other offices.
Source: CTK
