Estonia needs smoother sharing of spatial data, Kati Tamtik says

Estonia has a strong digital state, but spatial data still does not move smoothly enough across the public sector, Kati Tamtik, director general of the Land and Spatial Planning Board, writes in an opinion piece published by ERR.

The country is currently holding several important discussions. The state has launched the centralisation of IT houses to reduce duplication and use taxpayers’ money more efficiently. A new draft spatial data law has also recently reached the co-ordination stage, aiming to update Estonia’s system for managing spatial data. At the same time, significant work has been carried out over the past year to update the Planning Act and simplify various procedures.

These discussions are ultimately about whether the state can use data as a shared asset or whether it will continue with a fragmented approach in which the state, local governments and the private sector solve the same problems separately.

Estonia’s next digital leap will no longer depend on how many new information systems it builds, Tamtik writes. There are already too many of them. The next stage of development will depend on whether data is high-quality, up to date and machine-readable, and whether different information systems can use the same underlying data.

Data alone does not create value

Data is often described as the new gold, but its value comes from what can be done with it. Just as a mineral underground creates no wealth before it is extracted and processed, data creates no value until it becomes knowledge, decisions, services and economic value.

Spatial data has significant potential in this regard because it is underused in Estonia. It answers a simple question: what is located where? An estimated 80 percent of all data is connected to a location and is therefore spatial data by nature.

Almost every state decision is directly or indirectly a spatial decision. When deciding where to build a new school, hospital or emergency services building, it is not enough to have an empty plot of land. Decision-makers must assess the distribution of residents, accessibility, existing infrastructure and future development.

Building a new electricity network, planning a wind farm or maintaining roads requires precise information about what already exists in a particular location and what impact the new object will have on its surroundings.

Spatial data forms a digital layer over the physical world. This digital layer helps model and forecast the future in ways that cannot be done in the physical environment.

However, spatial data still does not move through Estonia’s public sector with the smoothness people expect from an e-state. The same data can exist in different registers, often in different formats, while much spatial data is stored in separate files. Local governments, state agencies and companies use different data models and develop similar solutions independently of one another.

This fragmentation costs money and wastes time on finding, checking, co-ordinating, reworking and correcting data. If spatial data is not accessible, high-quality, up to date and connected, how good can the decisions based on it be? Tamtik writes that high-quality spatial data is strategic infrastructure for the state, just like roads, electricity networks and communications connections.